5 Million Iraqis Killed Maimed Tortured - Think That Bothers War Boosters Like Christopher Hitchens?

http://www.alternet.org/story/147281/5_million_iraqis_killed%2C_maimed%2C_tortured%2C_displaced_--_think_that_bothers_war_boosters_like_christopher_hitchens?page=entire

AlterNet / By Fred Branfman

5 Million Iraqis Killed, Maimed, Tortured, Displaced -- Think That Bothers War Boosters Like Christopher Hitchens?

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Such questions are raised by Christopher Hitchens' recently published best-selling memoir, Hitch-22, in which he proudly claims to have helped cause the invasion of Iraq as the most prominent of a group of war hawks ("by which political Washington was eventually persuaded that Iraq should be helped into a post-Saddam era, if necessary by force”), but entirely ignores the human cost that followed. No one spoke more eloquently of the Iraqi people’s suffering before the invasion. Thus his indifference to it since has been striking.

The key issue is not what this reveals about Hitchens' soul but about America's. His memoir epitomizes one of the most chilling phenomena of our time: a growing “nonhumanity” in which our leaders and their supporters claim to wage war on behalf of a foreign people but are largely indifferent to their suffering.

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-- Hundreds of thousands dead and wounded: Estimates of dead civilians range from 100,000 documented cases by Iraq Body Count, which acknowledged in October 2004 that “our own total is certain to be an underestimate of the true position, because of gaps in reporting or recording” to over one million by a John Hopkins University group. A basic rule of thumb in war is that for every person killed, two have been wounded.

-- Tens of thousands of innocents imprisoned, many tortured: In an article headlined "In Iraq, A Prison Full of Innocent Men," the Washington Post reported that "100,000 prisoners have passed through the American-run detention system in Iraq," that Iraqi Vice President Tariq al-Hashimi says that "most of the people they detain are innocent,” but that prisoners are not permitted to prove their innocence. Conditions have been even worse in the secret torture chambers run for five years by General Stanley McChrystal, from which all outside observers including the Red Cross have been excluded. Salon's Glenn Greenwald recently reported that "72% of Guantanamo detainees who finally were able to obtain just minimal due process -- after years of being in a cage without charges -- have been found by federal judges to be wrongfully detained." Countless innocent Iraqis have been regularly tortured.

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U.S. indifference to civilian suffering is particularly noticeable in the case of "liberal war hawks" who justified the Iraq invasion on humanitarian grounds but then largely ignored its human costs as much as conservatives who do not even claim concern for the civilians they destroy. Slate, for example, asked an online panel of 10 such folks in March 2008 -- when civilian victims were in the millions -- to explain how they had gotten the Iraqi war wrong.

While all but one (Christopher Hitchens: "How Did I Get Iraq Wrong? I Didn't") acknowledged error, and a number expressed pain over civilian suffering, the reasons listed for their mistakes included misjudging "Bush's sense of morality," "I wanted to strike back," "I believed the groupthink," “I didn't realize how incompetent the Bush administration could be,” and the "the self-centeredness and sectarianism of the ruling elite."

All failed to acknowledge their own moral blindness in failing to imagine what millions of their fellow Americans clearly saw: the havoc that the U.S. war-machine would inevitably wreak on innocent Iraqi civilians whatever its stated intentions or claimed benefits.

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Chris Hedges' concern for post-invasion civilian suffering contrasts sharply with Hitchens' memoirs. Ample time has passed for Hitchens to provide a moral reckoning of the human costs and benefits of the invasion, and to apologize to both Iraqi victims and the millions of antiwar Americans whose concerns about post-invasion civilian suffering have proven so much more accurate than his own -- and whose personhood he so demeaned with epithets like "moral imbeciles," "noisy morons," "overbred and gutless," "naive" and "foolish."

Hitchens’ memoirs provide a textbook case of nonhumanity. For while proudly bragging of helping cause the invasion, he does not even mention let alone acknowledge responsibility for the civilian suffering to which it led.

He writes movingly, for example, of a fine young American, Mark Daily, who volunteered to fight in Iraq partly because of Hitchens’ pro-war writings and died heroically protecting his fellow-soldiers. But Hitchens does not mention even one of the countless Iraqis who did not volunteer to have their lives destroyed following the invasion he claimed would help them. He properly befriended Daily's parents, but does not discuss a single Iraqi parent among hundreds of thousands whose loss is equally great.

And he does not even mention the overall scale of Iraqi civilian suffering under U.S. occupation: 5-10 million murdered, maimed, homeless, unjustly imprisoned, tortured and impoverished innocent civilians have all been consigned to the dustbin of his – and America's -- history.

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:mad:

You and I think the same. That's the first thing I thought of when I read through the article.

when I step in it in my back yard. Nothing he says, believes or does is of any consequence to the world because he is soulless, narcissistic and full of shit. He even gives atheism a bad name by association.

They don't!

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Thanks,

cbayer
DU Moderator

2) hope that somebody was shot through a Koran so they won't survive to say that some holy book saved their life and 3) like his Coulteresque fellows in "the New Atheists," say that we are fighting for civilization against barbarism, so absolutely anything goes

If I were atheist I would sure put galaxies of distance between him and myself.

It means there will always be some lingering resentment that can be fanned into murderous hatred somewhere down the line. Then the arms factories fire up, the weapons roll out, and the money rolls in! Yee-haw! War is good business. Sucks if you're in the middle of it, but the soldiers volunteered, and the civilians should have gotten out of the way or something. You know what else about the civilians? Fuck 'em, that's what. There's more money to be siphoned out of the Treasury.