Walt under-estimates number of Muslims killed by the US

Stephan Walt -- one of the authors of The Israel Lobby -- has an article in Foreign Policy entitled "Why they hate us (II): How many Muslims has the U.S. killed in the past 30 years" which seriously underestimates the actual numbers, and more importantly, promotes a NeoCon spin on civilian casualties.

For example, Walt doesn't count the number of Muslims killed as a direct and consequential result of US support for Saddam during the Iran-Iraq war -- including the Kurds gassed in Halabja, whose deaths the US tried to blame onto Iran. As Joost Hiltermann has written:

Analysis of thousands of captured Iraqi secret police documents and declassified U.S. government documents, as well as interviews with scores of Kurdish survivors, senior Iraqi defectors and retired U.S. intelligence officers, show (1) that Iraq carried out the attack on Halabja, and (2) that the United States, fully aware it was Iraq, accused Iran, Iraq's enemy in a fierce war, of being partly responsible for the attack. The State Department instructed its diplomats to say that Iran was partly to blame.

Walt also severely underestimates the number of "excess deaths" attributable to pre-invasion sanctions on Iraq, and worse: then tries to blame those onto Saddam. He claims there was "at least" 100,000 deaths, when in fact several other inquiries have said that the figure for excess deaths of CHILDREN ALONE were around 500,000. (Read the articles by Shereen T. Ismael like this one for more info.) In fact, the 1999 report "Morbidity and Mortality Among Iraqi Children," by Columbia University's Richard Garfield, found estimate of approximately 350,000 excess CHILD deaths through 2000 -- much of it attributable to the deliberate US attacks on civilian infrastructure such as water treatment facilities (a war crime.) Mohamed Ali and Iqbal Shah published an article in The Lancet which also found significantly increased CHILD deaths in Iraq.

Of course Walt does say that he deliberately selected "low-end" estimates for Muslim fatalities, so these figures present the "best case" for the United States. But leaving the figures aside, what's really troubling is how Walt promotes the notion that these deaths can be attributed to Saddam Hussein:

Saddam Hussein clearly deserves much of the blame for these "excess deaths," insofar as he could have complied with Security Council resolutions and gotten the sanctions lifted or used the "oil for food" problem properly.

TOTAL RUBBISH. Walt should know better! This is the old "your face was in the way of my fist" spin. This was a rhetorical tool used by the Right to justify the misery caused by the sanctions on Iraq by shifting the blame onto Iraq -- it was however quite apparent that the sanctions were excessively restrictive in that they inordinately affected civilians (Iraq wasn't even allowed to import pencils or toilet paper leading to the resignation of several officials in charge of administering the sanctions.) Also, there was never any indication that the US was really willing to lift sanctions no matter what Saddam did -- in fact, quite the reverse, history now proves that the US intended on invading Iraq regardless (even planned it pre-9/11.)

Anyway, I am a amateur student of rhetoric and find this rhetorical ploy of trying to blame the victims for their own plight quite interesting. I commented on this thing before, as a member of theGulf2000 Project at Columbia University -- here's an excerpt from my post from that time on the topic of shifting blame:

I have seen a number of versions of this argument about the effect of sanctions on Iraqi children:

1- That the deaths were over-estimated and the UNICEF/FAO/Garfield studies were cooked up (denial)

2- That the number of deaths were "worth it" (justification)

3- That no one "meant" to kill children; they were just collateral damage (excuse)

4- That it was in fact the UN that imposed the sanctions (misdirection)

5- Saddam is responsible for the deaths since it was Saddam who provoked the sanctions (evasion)

There’s also the old adage about two wrongs making no right: Whatever Saddam did was no justification to bomb water treatment facilities and continue a sanctions regime that was clearly and disproportionately harming civilians.

Comments

[Ralph]

Thank you for your honest and straightforawrd posts which are always challenging. I come to this site regularly. This post was one of my favourites. Your willingness to be an iconoclast and challenge conventional wisdom, demanding facts and proof, and insisting on dredging up "inconvenient" information that others would prefer forgotten, rather than simply going along with the latest in mob mentality is really refreshing and educational.