Then we have the death toll of Iraqi civilians in the 2003 Gulf War. Of the several credible academic studies of civilian deaths in Iraq in the post-2003 invasion period, the most rigorous was the epidemiological study by John Hopkins University’s Bloomberg School of Public Health, which estimated 655,000 excess Iraqi civilian deaths due to the war. Although the study employed standard statistical methods widely used in the scientific community, critics argued that the numbers of bodies being discovered did not match Lancet figures, which were more than 5 times greater than the Iraqi health ministry’s figures. Yet even the Ministry of Defence’s chief scientific adviser described the survey’s methods as “close to best practice” and its results “robust”, advising ministers not to criticise the study in public. [Paul Reynolds, “Huge gaps between Iraq death estimates”, BBC News (20 October 2006) http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/6045112.stm; Owen Bennett-Jones, “Iraqi deaths survey ‘was robust’” BBC News (26 March 2007) http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/6495753.stm].
Indeed, Lancet’s figures could be empirically verified if journalists visited several locations at random in Iraq and discovered local reports of 4 or 5 times more deaths. This is exactly what was subsequently done by the British polling agency, Opinion Business Research (ORB), which has tracked public opinion in Iraq since 2005. Working with an Iraqi fieldwork agency, ORB conducted face-to-face interviews with a nationally representative sample of 1,720 adults aged 18 plus. Interviewees were asked how many members of their household had died as a result of the Iraq conflict since 2003. The ORB poll found that 1.2 million Iraqi civilians had been murdered since the invasion. [Tina Susman, “Poll: Civilian Death Toll in Iraq May Top 1 Million”, Los Angeles Times (14 September 2007)] These are staggering figures. They suggest that since 1991, the total civilian death toll in Iraq as a consequence of Anglo-American invasions, socio-economic deprivation and occupation amount to a total of 3 million.
The “hidden holocaust in history” thus continues now. It erupts directly from the unjust political and economic structure of the global system, and intensifies against target populations in the process of the system’s attempts to expand and consolidate its interests and activities, to eliminate resistance to its rule.
Hand on his heart, Tony Blair told the world before his resignation that he “believed” what he did in Iraq was “right”. No doubt, so did Hitler with regard to his exterminatory campaigns in Europe.
Some of us may well believe that what the Anglo-American centres of imperial power are doing in Iraq is justifiable. But the truth is that most of the worst crimes in history were committed by people who truly "believed" that what they were doing was "Right".
If we have any semblance of humanity left in us as we stand and stare pathetically, immobile, at the scale of the horror our governments have wrought, then our most urgent task must be to discover why our global system, as it has expanded not only during the era of traditional modern “colonization” but even moreso in the era of postmodern “globalization”, systematically generates genocidal violence against hundreds of millions of people across the South; and systematically finds ways to legitimize this violence as normal, functional, necessary… for us to live, breathe and prosper.
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