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July 26, 2005
You Know You Are in the Wrong Country When... They're All Insurgents
I hadn't noticed this headline in the Washington Times, but it was quite striking when pointed out to me: "50,000 Iraqi insurgents dead, caught."
U.S. and Iraqi forces have killed or arrested more than 50,000 Iraqi insurgents in the past seven months, a former top general who has headed repeated Pentagon assessment missions to Iraq said yesterday.....
Gen. Keane's remarks provided a rare insight into the extent of U.S.-led operations against an insurgency that has been responsible for hundreds of deaths in the past few weeks alone.
So, let me get this claim straight. This general is claiming that we have killed or captured 50,000 insurgents in the past seven months alone. Just to get a sense of the scale, consider that we have 130,000 to 140,000 troops in Iraq -- and the population of the country as a whole is about 22 million. If we killed and captured 50,000 in the last seven months, close to half the number of troops we have there, and the insurgency keeps growing, as it has been, it means the whole population must be composed mainly of insurgents.
Was this general trying to boast about or condemn the occupation?
Let me give you another point of reference. Claiming to have killed or captured 50,000 insurgents would scale to about 650,000 if we were talking about the United States. Imagine the conditions under which an occupying army would be claiming to have killed and captured that many Americans in the space of seven months.
Posted by zeynep at July 26, 2005 09:49 PM
Comments
The general's comments and Zeynep's analysis remind me of something an old Russian friend told me one day in 1989, before the fall of the USSR. "My dear Richard, the problem with you Westerners is that you are the only ones who believe government propaganda. We ordinary Russians have known that our government has been lying to us for fifty years. So we go elsewhere to get our information than national media and licenced radio stations. You guys, on the other hand, believe everything your government and its apologists tell you. Forgive me, but that makes you both less informed and more stupid than we Russians are."
What I find sad is that by expecting us to believe his wild claims, General Keane not only insults our intelligence, he also makes clear the limits of military intelligence, both of the spying and human kind. What I find tragic, however, is that his claim of 50,000 killed and captured is probably true. True about the numbers, but not about the status of those who died. In other words, the US military HAS killed 50,000 Iraqis, only these were ordinary Iraqis, not insurgents. What Gen. Keane does not realize is that he has thus provided the most potent confirmation of the accuracy of the Lancet report of 100,000 Iraqis killed by US bombing and other military forays, since the beginning of the war. In doing so, Gen. Keane has exposed the very lies that his own superiors at the White House have been trying to suppress.
Seymour Hersh has also written about a US lieutenant complaining to him that a platoon of US GIs had massacred more than a dozen Iraqi civilians in a village that he and his men were guarding, and this despite both his and his men's protestations. The response of the platoon commander? "Body count." In other words, they needed to show that they were killing "insurgents" and to this end any dead body would do. As long as they were dead. The advice Sy Hersh gave the Lieutenant was something to the effect of "Shut up! Just shut up and keep quiet, otherwise you might run the risk of being 'accidentally' shot by friendly fire."
Urgent request to Gen. Keane: please do not insult the itelligence of those whose tax dollars pay your salary. Thank you.
The problem is that I can actually imagine that Gen. Keane probably believes his pronouncements which the rest of the thinking world knows do not represent reality. This dichotomy is at the heart of the problem of the US presence in Iraq, Afghanistan, Haiti, and elsewhere. After all, if soldiers did not by and large believe their own propaganda, they would not engage in the kind of mass killing and torturing spectacle we have seen in Iraq over the past 15 years, and Afghanistan recently.
Posted by: Richard Thorneside at July 27, 2005 05:57 PM
Another thing: if 50.000 insurgents are killed or captured, how many of them are killed? I have read numbers of prisoners of, at most, 17.000. Not all of them must have been insurgents. Some people get released, to be replaced by other prisoners. Still, ist seems plausible that at least half of these 50.000 must be killed, not imprisoned. In 7 monts ! The occupation had been going on for 27 monts now...
Either this general is making the numbers up to boast about his "successes", or the estimate of the number of victims of the occupation given by The Lancet last October - close to 100.000 - may be a gross UNDERestimate.
Posted by: rooieravotr at July 28, 2005 04:08 PM
A number of them are also foreign insurgents.
Posted by: My-An at July 30, 2005 02:17 AM