Real death in a primetime war

That this sounds a tad hyperbolic, considering that there were at least as many looters as they were those who turned out to cheer the 8216;liberating8217; M1 Abrams tanks and M2 Bradley Fighting Vehicles, is really not of much consequence because everything is unreal about this war.

If Gulf War One was the world8217;s first televised war, Gulf War Two could well go down in history as the world8217;s first tele-constructed war, with each broadcasted word and visual deemed a contribution to the US-British war effort.

As Pentagon8217;s vision melds with television, reality is deconstructed and reconstructed, defined and refined until it takes on the consistency of pre-digested pap and dished out by the ear full and the hour full to audiences around the world, round the clock.

The average American then should be forgiven for believing that this war is nothing but an impressive, 20-day fireworks display on the banks of the Tigris, brought to them courtesy the Pentagon. A trauma-free, roller-coaster ride through Iraq, with fun visuals of Saddam Hussein8217;s gilded potty thrown in for free.

The myth that smart weapons do not kill innocent civilians 8212;only the bad guys 8212; has all but decommissioned the apparatus of moral outrage in Middle America. None of the visuals that crowd Arab networks, of sobbing fathers hauling the blood-soaked bodies of their six-year-olds to hospitals, of mothers beating their breast in grief, disturbs the peace of suburban homes in San Jose and Jacksonville.

Brief references to casualties come sterilised in phrases like 8216;8216;mopping up8217;8217; operations or 8216;8216;precision bombing of targets of opportunity8217;8217;.

In fact, if you go strictly by television footage, it would appear that there are two completely different wars being waged in Iraq, a bipolarity that underlines yet again the disturbing disconnect between the Arab street and the West.

It should therefore come as no surprise that even as public anger in West Asia rises steadily, the American public has displayed an uncommon stomach for more. Polls indicate that not only do 77 per cent of all Americans support the decision to go to war, half the US population wants military action against Iran if it continues to move toward nuclear weapons development and 42 per cent said that the US should take action against Syria if it is helping Iraq.

The US military juggernaut can thus roll on, unhindered by opposition from the international community, unhampered by Security Council vetoes. The only factor that could have immobilised it 8212; domestic public opinion 8212; has been successfully managed by a combination of soundbites and editing. In this enterprise, what is not seen is almost as important as what is heard.

One of the missing pieces of information is the precise number of civilian casualties that this brutish war has entailed. According to one source, some 1,252 civilians have been killed and 5,103 injured. However, estimations differ widely.

Red Cross personnel have stated that hospitals received hundreds of wounded every day 8212; up to 100 an hour when fighting was at its most intense. Hospital workers in Basra 8212; the site of cluster bombing by British forces 8212; say that they8217;ve handled 1,000 to 2,000 bodies in the three weeks of war, only some of whom were soldiers, others were women, children and the elderly.

The figure involving US and British military personnel, in contrast, is so low as to be almost negligible 8212; 130 to 150, so far. But then, as those who have studied military history point out, civilian casualties in military conflicts have been on the increase.

In World War I, there was one civilian death for every 20 military deaths. In World War II the ratio had come down to 1:1. By the time Vietnam came along, it was 20 civilians for 1 military death. The latest figures of the Iraq war, with its heavy reliance on aerial bombardment, only shows the trend getting more pronounced.

It will be a while before some conscientious soul puts together a 24-million piece jigsaw and come up with a credible figure for the dead. In the last Gulf War, a 29-year-old demographer in the US Commerce Department called Beth Osborne Daponte tried to do this and almost got fired for her pains.

Daponte8217;s figures contradicted the stance of then US defence secretary, Richard Cheney, who had just told the world that 8216;8216;we have no way of knowing precisely how many casualties occurred8217;8217; during the fighting 8216;8216;and may never know8217;8217;. Daponte, by sitting with a 1987 volume of the Iraqi census and UN figures, had concluded that 13,000 civilians were killed directly by American and allied forces and about 70,000 civilians died subsequently from war-related damage to medical facilities and supplies, the electric power grid and the water system. This figure did not include the 40,000 Iraqi soldiers killed in the conflict. Over time, Daponte has had occasion to refine that figure: According to her, in all some 205,500 Iraqis died in Gulf War I and its aftermath. Her numbers, as she points out, tell an interesting story 8212; that in modern warfare, post-war deaths from adverse health effects account for a large percentage of total deaths. 8216;8216;In the Gulf War, far more people died from postwar health effects than from direct war effects,8217;8217; said Daponte.

The difference between the earlier war and the present one was that in 1991 it was Saddam Hussein and his tyrannical regime that bore a great part of the responsibility for the holocaust unleashed on the region by having invaded Kuwait in the first place.

This time round, the Bush-Blair duo do not have that alibi, even with their embedded media giving them air support by painting them as 8216;8216;liberators8217;8217;. They have, if they do not know it already, just inherited Saddam Hussein8217;s old title. It8217;s they who have become the 8216;Butchers of Baghdad8217;.