In Memoriam: 4081

That's the number of reported deaths of American soldiers in Iraq since hostilities began in March 2003.**


I'm still waiting for someone to explain to me why we're there and how we're going to extricate ourselves. Even my man Barack Obama, who I think will steer a much wiser course in future foreign policy, doesn't have a truly persuasive plan for getting out. No one does.

That figure of 4081 deaths doesn't count other Allied deaths, nor non-fatal (but often devastating) injuries, nor the orders-of-magnitude higher toll among Iraqis. You can find much of that information at iCasualties: Iraq Coalition Casualty Count.

For Iraqis, the Lancet put "excess deaths" at 655,000 in its October 2006 study. The Iraq Body Count project estimates roughly 90,000 as of May 2008. (Wikipedia gives a decent overview of the controversies over Iraqi casualty figures for both the Lancet and the IBC.)

I tend to believe the Lancet numbers are closer to the truth because they use statistical and epidemiological approaches to compensate for the difficulty of obtaining an accurate actual count. But even the lower IBC number is scandalous.

Whatever the exact numbers, they raise the question: What are we commemorating this Memorial Day? Yes, there's been a lot of bravery among both Allied forces and ordinary Iraqis, among soldiers and civilians alike. But to what purpose?

What will redeem the losses that so many of them have suffered - whether a dear comrade or family member, a limb, their mental health, or their very life?

** Figures were current as of the start of Memorial Day 2008.

Poppies from a neighbor's garden.

The Children of Abu Graib

This is not an atrocity blog. I promise this sort of thing won't become a daily feature. But I spent a long while crying about this today, and then I decided to turn those tears into outraged action. Since I can't singlehandedly shut down Abu Ghraib, I can only write about it - and urge y'all to vote for candidates who seem likely to shutter that hellhole forever.

In the not-quite-latest New Yorker, there's a profile of Sabrina Harman, the woman who took most of the infamous Abu Ghraib photos, that's as insightful as it is chilling. The authors, Philip Gourevitch and Errol Morris, use extensive interviews with Harman and several of her fellow MPs to illuminate how a bunch of young people who mostly just wanted to subsidize their college education gradually became inured to torture. Or nearly so; it turns out that Harman's pictures were motivated by a mixture of macabre fascination, gallows humor, and a partly-inchoate awareness that she was partaking in atrocities that needed to be documented.

The whole article is long and upsetting but very much worth your time. For me, the most upsetting part is Harman's comments about children being held in Abu Ghraib. Yep, that's right - kids as young as ten were locked up, generally in order to coerce confessions from their fathers.

You may be asking: Wait, don't you mean Saddam's Abu Ghraib? Well, yes, Saddam also imprisoned and raped family members to extract confessions. But guess what: We didn't just take over his prison, we took over some of his most heinous tactics.

Gourevitch and Morris write:

It was easier to be nice to the women and children on Tier 1B [than to the adult male prisoners], but, Harman said, “It was kind of sad that they even had to be there.” The youngest prisoner on the tier was just ten years old—“a little kid,” she said. “He could have fit through the bars, he was so little.” Like a number of the other kids and of the women there, he was being held as a pawn in the military’s effort to capture or break his father.

Harman enjoyed spending time with the kids. She let them out to run around the tier in a pack, kicking a soccer ball, and she enlisted them to help sweep the tier and distribute meals—special privileges, reserved only for the most favored prisoners on the M.I. block. “They were fun,” she said. “They made the time go by faster.” She didn’t like seeing children in prison “for no reason, just because of who your father was,” but she didn’t dwell on that. What was the point? “You can’t feel because you’ll just go crazy, so you just kind of blow it off,” Harman said. “You can only make their stay a little bit acceptable, I guess. You give them all the candy from the M.R.E.s to make their time go by better. But there’s only so much you can do or so much you can feel.”

But even this account plays down the horror of it, though the article otherwise doesn't pull many punches. Since Gourevitch and Morris have kindly posted some of their primary source material at the New Yorker online, you can read in the interview transcript that the ball playing petered out as the prison grew increasingly overcrowded. Said Harman:

It got filled up pretty fast, so fast that we couldn’t take the children out anymore and they had to stay in their cells. We used to let them out and play ball with them. Like, just let them out in the tier and locked the main lock, like the main door so they couldn’t get out. And we’d have like 20 kids just running around and we couldn’t do it anymore because these other prisoners were coming in. These…We had people that were crazy and we had people that were just causing problems and we just couldn’t let them out because you don’t want them talking to these other people or passing them notes or corrupting the kids. So we had to keep the kids inside also. So it was pretty much like they were also being interrogated pretty much because they were in a cell. Maybe if you were one of the lucky ones, you would get out for like a half hour to help pass around food or go take your shower, or if you want a cold shower. But it was getting really crowded.
(Read the rest of Harman's comments on the children.)

We had people that were crazy. Yeah, I know she means prisoners who'd snapped, but what about her direct superiors, who put Harman and the other MPs into a situation without any training, apparently precisely so they wouldn't know that they were being ordered and encouraged to violate U.S. military and international law on the treatment of prisons? What about their superiors - all the way up to and including Rumsfeld, Cheney, and Bush?

I do recall Sy Hersh referring to women and children being raped in Abu Ghraib shortly after the first torture photos became public, but I had no clue that their detention was a systematic, long-term practice as opposed to a few isolated incidents. And I'm one of the people who's paying attention, most of the time. (For a round-up of the "old news" on this, see this American Leftist post from July 2004 and also Hersh's comments as reported in Salon's War Room.)

What I want to know - and what I can't figure out, despite having googled it like crazy - is this: Are children still being held in U.S. military and CIA prisons today?

Maybe we'll get an answer to this from the New Yorker article's co-author, Errol Morris, who has directed a documentary on Abu Ghraib, S.O.P.: Standard Operating Procedure, that won a jury prize at the Berlinale and is scheduled for release in the U.S. later this month. Or maybe, like so much else about this war, we won't know the answer even when the historians get their say.

One thing I do know for sure: Holding family members hostage to extract a prisoner's confession violates international law. Our next president better know this, too.

Prostitution among Iraqi Refugees

On the five-year anniversary of the start of this stupid, immoral war, Alternet reported that an estimated 50,000 Iraqi women and girls in Syria have been forced into prostitution because as refugees they had no other means of sustenance. As the shock and snickers fade from the Spitzer affair, this comes as a harsh reminder that many, if not most, prostitutes either have no meaningful choice in entering sex work or "choose" it under tightly constrained circumstances.

According to Alternet's source on this, The Independent, many of the clients are Saudis seeking pleasures they can't find at home. A prostitute can earn $60 per evening - equivalent to a month's pay in a factory. As a refugee, she'd be barred from working legally in a factory anyway. Family members not uncommonly pressure or force women and girls - some as young as 13 - to sell their bodies:

Bassam al-Kadi of Syrian Women Observatory says: "Some have been sexually abused in Iraq, but others are being prostituted by fathers and uncles who bring them here under the pretext of protecting them. They are virgins, and they are brought here like an investment and exploited in a very ugly way."
(Source: The Independent)

The girls enter the clubs where they work fully covered, as modest as any other devout Muslim, and tart themselves up once inside, sometimes aping Girls Gone Wild moves to entice potential customers.

But the majority of prostituted Iraqis are forced into it not by family but by the threat of starvation, according to a New York Times report published last year. Part of the problem is that a sizable fraction of the 1.2 million Iraqi refuges in Syria have no man in the household; women with no work permit and no work experience thus have no other choice.

UN Security Council Resolution 1325 on Women, Peace, and Security requires all branches of the UN to considered the gendered impacts of war. Prostitution and human trafficking are among the biggest of these (along with rape as a weapon of war). But precisely because the scope of the problem is so huge, the UN's resources are vastly inadequate to addressing the problem. To make things worse, in a number of other war zones UN peacekeepers have themselves become involved in the prostitution trade, as Elisabeth Rehn and Ellen Johnson Sirleaf found in the their 2002 UNIFEM report, "Women, War, Peace."

Of course, one could also demand accountability from the entity that created the Iraqi refugee crisis in the first place. But that'd first require ... regime change.

Photo of Damascus Old Town by Flickr user Richard Messenger, used under a Creative Commons license.

Five Years Ago Today, We Made a Historic Mistake

If you've been reading this blog even semi-regularly, you know that I teach women's studies. But my actual degree is in German history with a minor field in women's studies. So today I'm donning my historian's cap to say a few words about the Iraq war as I think it might be viewed in history books 50 or 100 years from now.

It's not the case that every last historian opposed the war from the get-go. But it's also not an accident that most of them did. Some of the leading luminaries of the profession are involved in Historians against the War, as are lots of us humbler practitioners. Thousands more who haven't signed the HAW petition still ardently opposed Bush's war of aggression.

Yeah, we're a bunch of liberals and pinko lefties, but by golly, those of us who earned a Ph.D. have spent a decade or so being formally trained to do something most Americans, left or right, never do: to take the long view.

Now, a good historian always relies on evidence to back up her assertions. We fetishize footnotes. Most of us are pretty fixated on archival research, too. With regard to the Iraq war, all of our usual goodies will be classified for decades to come, so we can't yet draw historical conclusions that would satisfy any historian's standard of evidence. And yet I think it's possible - by taking the long view - to advance a few educated guesses about how future historians will view this debacle.

First, the evidence for prosecuting a war of aggression was self-evidently weak to non-existent in the summer of 2002. This was obvious to any thoughtful, critical observer outside the Beltway even at the time, not just in retrospect. It was also glaringly obvious that this war was being marketed to us. This came out in Andy Card's famous statement about August being a bad month to sell a war: "From a marketing point of view, you don't introduce new products in August.'' Dick Cheney's blatantly overblown insinuations of a connection between Saddam and Al Qaida also ought to have been a dead giveaway that none of the "evidence" for war was trustworthy. Even Colin Powell's famous speech to the UN - which postdated the Senate resolution authorizing war, let's not forget - should have been no more than a call for the UN inspectors to step up their search for weapons of mass destruction on the basis of the intelligence Powell cited. Future historians will likely judge all of the actors - from the Senate to the Pentagon, from the New York Times to the White House - quite harshly for their blindness, stupidity, and mendacity.

And speaking of mendacity, I think it's likely that only the declassified archival material will show just how many lies we've been fed. We all know by now (or we should, if we don't watch too much Fox News) that there were no WMD, that George Tenet spun the "slam-dunk" evidence to support the administrations case for war, that Saddam and Al Qaida were sworn enemies, that Rumsfeld and Cheney were pushing an Iraq invasion just days after 9/11 following the agenda of the Project for the New American Century. We're going to have to wait at least a couple more decades to discover just how very intricate a web of lies Bush and his cronies spun; this assumes that they haven't been massively destroying documents as they've already been busted doing with emails. In that case, historians will view the administration even more balefully, because we really don't like it if you fuck with our source base.

Finally, I'm pretty sure that the Iraq war will mark the end of American hegemony as we've known it. The war has bankrupted us for a generation to come, financially and morally. It's undermined our military readiness; troops are burned out, and understandably so, as they spend months in the desert hoping and praying they won't be blown up, only to return to a homeland where the V.A. lacks necessary services and no one else is being asked to make sacrifices - and where they face redeployment mere months later, never mind that many of them only signed up for the Reserves or the Guard. We're stretched so thin in Iraq that we don't have the strength to respond to crises elsewhere, as Katrina proved. Add to this skyrocketing oil prices, a tanking dollar, a historically unfavorable balance of payments, strained relations with our long-time allies, the inexorable rise of China - and we can only conclude that the long American party is over.

The New American Century is stillborn, thanks to our friends at the PNAC, and the old one is dead. Historians 50 or 100 years hence will almost certainly pinpoint March 19, 2003, as the date when the American hegemon went on life support.

Iraqing the Vote

Yesterday Arianna Huffington called attention to something that's hard me boiling mad for weeks now: the disappearance of Iraq as an issue in the presidential campaign. I have a bit of a love-hate relationship with Arianna. She's too privileged - too rich, too connected, too Hollywood-ish, too often on Larry King. But she's often spot-on, and so she was yesterday in calling the candidates and media to task for ignoring the war.

Given how similar the leading Democrats are on domestic issues, Iraq - and foreign policy in general - ought to be front and center in their campaigns. It's their trump suit when it comes to winning in November, and it's also one area where their records diverge notably. Yet lately they've been almost mum on the war. Guess they've been too busy slogging through the destructo-politics of race and gender.

For me, Obama's early and consistent opposition to our attacking Iraq is the most compelling reason to support his candidacy. Yeah, he's a rhetorical magician and stands a good chance of drawing votes even from committed Republicans. (I say this on the basis of a highly scientific poll of my family members, N=2, so take it with a big block of salt.) But his condemnation of the war is the deal-maker for me. It's important enough to me that it neutralizes the allure of voting for the first female presidential contender.

Of course, you might object that the three leading Dems don't differ greatly on what they'll do to extricate us from the mess in Iraq. And that's true. Our options are severely limited. Edwards may have a slightly more aggressive plan to draw down American troops faster and more completely, as some have argued, including Joshua Holland on Alternet. But even if that's so, he'd be tightly constrained by Congress and the military leadership, just as any other possible president would be. Because of this, I'm not convinced there are practical differences in the candidates' positions (apart from Kucinich and Ron Paul).

So why does Obama's initial position on Iraq even matter, now that we're neck-deep in a Mess-opotamia and have very few options to extricate ourselves? Because it's our best indicator of how he'll respond to Iran, Pakistan, and other nations that threaten international stability. Clinton's rhetoric on Iran has been considerably harsher. She mocked Obama's stated willingness to actually talk to Syria's leadership. She voted for the Vile-Lieberman - I mean, Kyl-Lieberman - amendment, thus helping ratchet up our confrontation with Iran. And while it would be unfair to judge her solely on her husband's record as president, it's still worth noting that Bill Clinton had few reservations about dropping a bomb or two on Sudan or Iraq during his presidency.

Me, I'd rather have a president who'd mend fences and negotiate with foreign leaders rather than rattle the sabers and drop the bombs. And I think Obama will be that guy.