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Calling Off the WMD Search

By Nicholas F. Benton

Commenting in Tuesday’s London Guardian, Terry Jones makes a salient point. According to the findings of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, just published in the prestigious scientific journal, Lancet, approximately 100,000 people, mostly innocent civilians, have been killed as a result of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq and the subsequent warfare.

This stands as the only authoritative estimate of net casualties in Iraq to date and one of the authors of the report, Dr. Gilbert Burnham, is quoted saying, “Our data have been back and forth between many reviewers at the Lancet and here in the school, so we have the scientific strength to say what we have said with great certainty.”

Jones’ reaction is simple. Given this scale of carnage, why has the international community not reacted to it with the same extraordinary outpouring of concern and compassion as it has in response to the Asian tsunami? The numbers, after all, are comparable in their almost unthinkable scale: 100,000 in Iraq, 150,000 in Asia.

Further, in Iraq, as in Asia, the numbers are bound to climb and for many of the same reasons: the breakdown of core infrastructures that will lead to countless more deaths from disease and malnutrition. Even the Bloomberg School report on Iraq doesn’t estimate how many added, collateral deaths there have been already due to lack of fresh water and basic resources knocked out by the conflict. Iraq’s national electrical supply remains at about 75% of pre-invasion levels, as U.S. Major General Thomas Bostwick, commander of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, confirmed yesterday, and is lower than mid-December levels. Also, in their recent attack on Fallujah, U.S. Marines bombed one and closed another hospital and cut off the water and electrical supply to about 200,000 people.

Jones’ remarks are, of course, rhetorical. While President Bush and British Prime Minister Blair have fallen all over themselves to demonstrate awareness of the scale of the disaster in Asia, they’re being working overtime to conceal the death count in Iraq.

In the context of this, yesterday marked yet another historic day in the chronicle of the great Iraq fiasco. It saw the confluence of three important new developments. On January 12, 2005, almost 22 months after the invasion of Iraq was launched, the following happened:

The search for “weapons of mass destruction” by the Iraq Survey Group in Iraq was officially called off by the Bush administration after finding nothing, nada, not a thing. The infamous, phantom WMDs were, if you recall, virtually the sole justification the Bush administration provided the U.S. population and the international community for why it had to invade. It needs also to be recalled that many, including United Nations inspectors on the ground in Iraq, were contending at the time that there were no WMDs there. Yesterday finally confirmed, once and for all, that they were right all along and that when Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld said on national TV that not only were WMDs there, but that he knew where they were and specified their locations, he was blowing smoke.

A major U.S. newspaper has officially called for the postponement of the scheduled Jan. 30 elections in Iraq. A lengthy editorial in yesterday’s New York Times conceded that it’s time to face reality in Iraq, where the violence and mayhem is escalating daily as “election day” approaches. The cornerstone of Bush’s re-election campaign, the notion that the invasion of Iraq would bring democracy and freedom to that country and that a nationwide election on Jan. 30 would bring that to pass, has now crumbled. Now, premature elections would only further enflame conditions for a full-blown civil war between Sunni and Shiite Muslims, which already a deadly threat to destabilize the entire region. A temporary postponement might embolden anti-U.S. insurgents for a time, but that would a far less ominous outcome than a full-blown civil war, the Times warned. Elections in Iraq on Jan. 30, under current conditions, will be a sham, a cosmetic show more lurid than Bush’s pathetic, staged “Mission Accomplished” fantasy on the aircraft carrier in June 2003, and, in fact, will only make matters worse.

American public opinion crossed over the 50% line on Jan. 12. For the first time since the invasion, a majority of Americans, according to the Gallup Poll, now think the invasion was the wrong thing to do. According to the polling agency, the numbers have been gradually falling since the summer of 2003, but were still firmly above 50% going into the election last November. But for the first time, more Americans now think the whole thing was a bad idea than not. That trend can be expected to continue as death totals of U.S. soldiers continue to climb and the incredible cost of the occupation to U.S. taxpayers begins to sink in.

It’s a terrible shame that 100,000 lives had to be lost in Iraq just to get to this point. But there’s no guarantee, of course, that any of those Jan. 12 developments are going to change the U.S.’s course of action, and that only makes yesterday even sadder.

Nicholas Benton may be emailed at nfbenton@fcnp.com

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