Thoughts on War

The facts and figures of war

How many Iraqis have been killed in the last year? How many have been tortured? How many dwellings have been destroyed? How many have been burgled? How many jobs have been lost? How many Iraqi breadwinners are unable, now, to feed their children? How many children have been forced into beggary and crime? How many are no longer going to school? How many have been killed mistakenly at checkpoints?

When will Tariq Aziz, an English-speaking, cultured Christian diplomat, go on trial? What will he be charged with? Is Tariq Aziz being tortured? Why is David Hicks being tortured? When will he go on trial? What, apart from having bad thoughts, will he be charged with? What is his likely sentence if he is convicted?

When can Saddam Hussein see his lawyers? Why the delay? When can Dan Rather interview him again on television? Why the delay?

In an age of total information we know none of these things. We cannot even learn the dimmest ballpark figures. Sixty thousand dead? Twenty thousand? Three thousand tortured? One thousand? Twenty-five years for David Hicks? Three years?

Our ignorance of these things compares with the usual cloud of unknowing in a South American dictatorship. The fate of many Iraqis is as mysterious as the fate of the Disappeared. The laws under which Tariq Aziz and David Hicks will be tried are yet to be written. After three thousand years of western jurisprudence there is not yet a name for what they did.

Why is this?

It can only be, I think, that such figures and facts if known and written down will hurt the American cause. Sixty thousand Iraqi dead in this war would dwarf the 2800 American dead on 9/11 and the 220 dead in this war. Two thousand Iraqis tortured by Americans would lessen the loathsomeness of Saddam's torture chambers. A trial date for David Hicks would raise the question of George Bush's 'infinite justice' and its legality. The fact that Tariq - or even Saddam - being tortured would look, in the light of Nuremberg, untidy.

So only useful facts and figures are permitted to be known. The three hundred thousand, or is it five hundred thousand, in Saddam's mass graves. The millions of American dollars in cash that Saddam and his sons had with them. The 5000 Kurd villagers killed by 'chemical weapons'. The 'rape rooms' that so intrigue George Bush.

But it should be asked, I think, if these facts and figures are true or not - or, if true, how exaggerated. Some of us will recall the first estimates of the dead on 9/11 being fifty- to sixty-thousand souls. Some of us will recall the Weapons of Mass Destruction, fireable within 45 minutes, we went to war to 'disarm' a crazy warlike tyrant of. In nine months of war and insurgency, none have been used.

So we should look with care at the mass grave numbers too. Maybe the figure is more like one hundred thousand. Maybe some of the dead were killed by the bombs of Desert Storm in 1991. Maybe some were killed by the bombs of Iraqi Freedom in 2003. Maybe some were killed by the 'no-fly-zone' bombing after 1997, the bombs that blew up Iraqi dams and crops and polluted Iraqi water in freedom's name.

We should look on these numbers with some care. Because if it turns out that more Iraqis were killed by the two Bush wars and the sanctions - seven hundred thousand? a million? maybe only two hundred thousand - than by Saddam (four hundred thousand? two hundred thousand? maybe only eighty thousand) then it isn't liberation we've been up to, it's conquest, and theft of property, and enslavement of a cultured people. And the murder, without good cause, of, what, five hundred thousand innocent children? Two hundred thousand? Or only fifty thousand?

Only fifty thousand innocent children killed in liberation's name. That's not too high a price to pay, surely.

Fascism comes by inches. And it starts with cover-ups like these, of figures we ought to know. And people imprisoned and never tried. And tortured without cause or purpose. And false hysterical rumour of the coming invasion and the enemy within, an enemy lethally armed and mad and fanatical and 'hating our freedom'. Communists. Anarchists. Infidels. Heathens. Filthy Jews.

And we cross the line into fascism softly and silently and swiftly.

And we look back over our shoulders, too late, at all the freedoms we have lost.

It starts with ignorance of the figures, and the facts. And then it grows.