The Weekly Standard: Smarmy, Repulsive, and Fact-Free

"Hollywood Hates the Troops" is the title of the Weekly Standard's latest screed against anyone who writes or speaks out in public or -- in Brian DePalma's case -- makes a film, about the suffering of Iraqi civilians (which is to say, most Iraqis) as a result of this preemptive, aggressive, unnecessary, U.S.-initiated war. Since the piece is short, I'll quote it in full:

"We've killed over 400,000 of their citizens." That's what actor Tim Robbins thinks U.S. troops have been doing in Iraq. He made the claim last week in an appearance on HBO's Real Time with Bill Maher.

He's wrong, of course. American soldiers have not been slaughtering 300 Iraqis a day for the last four years. Even for one of Hollywood's most feculent personalities, this is an appalling slander of U.S. troops.

The Iraq Body Count is an antiwar website that tallies all civilian deaths in Iraq as reported in the news media. Theirs is a comprehensive count that seeks to hold the United States and Britain accountable for a wide range of civilian deaths. As explained at iraqbodycount.org: "The count includes civilian deaths caused by coalition military action and by military or paramilitary responses to the coalition presence (e.g. insurgent and terrorist attacks). It also includes excess civilian deaths caused by criminal action resulting from the breakdown in law and order which followed the coalition invasion."

The antiwar group's "maximum count"? At the moment, 77,555. That's one-fifth the number concocted by Robbins's overactive imagination.

Just as we were inclined to dismiss Robbins as a lonely voice of idiocy, news came of director Brian DePalma's Redacted, one of eight new movies about the Iraq War due out in the coming months, according to Reuters. "Inspired by one of the most serious crimes committed by American soldiers in Iraq since the 2003 invasion, it is a harrowing indictment of the conflict and spares the audience no brutality to get its message across."

The film is based on the story of a brutal rape and murder of a young Iraqi girl and the killing of her family at the hands of four American soldiers. Sgt. Paul Cortez, who has admitted his role in the attack, was sentenced earlier this year to 100 years in prison. Most Americans who read about this brutal crime probably understood that most soldiers don't behave this way. DePalma does not. "The movie is an attempt to bring the reality of what is happening in Iraq to the American people," he said last week.

How about the reality of what's happening in Hollywood? Says Pete Hegseth of Vets for Freedom: "These statements reflect the utter ignorance of Robbins and DePalma about what American soldiers are actually doing in Iraq. At every opportunity, they use their celebrity status to bash the very soldiers and Marines who are fighting for them. They reflexively side with radical Islamic terrorists rather than take an honest look at the situation in Iraq."

There is almost nothing that bears even a passing resemblance to reality in the above. Taking an honest look at the situation in Iraq would require acknowledging that, while the gang rape and murder of 14-year-old Abeer Qassim Hamza (yes, she had a name), along with the massacre of her family, were particularly heinous, savage crimes, they are hardly freak occurrences in a mostly benevolent U.S. occupation.

One could spend many weeks and months, or even years, researching the sufferings of Iraqis as a direct result of the American presence. I will limit myself here to this account from late June, 2006, by Nir Rosen, a freelance journalist and author of In the Belly of the Green Bird: The Triumph of the Martyrs in Iraq [bolds are mine]:

Three years into an occupation of Iraq replete with so-called milestones, turning points and individual events hailed as “sea changes” that would “break the back” of the insurgency, a different type of incident received an intense, if ephemeral, amount of attention. A local human rights worker and aspiring journalist in the western Iraqi town of Haditha filmed the aftermath of the massacre of 24 Iraqi civilians. The video made its way to an Iraqi working for Time magazine, and the story was finally publicized months later. The Haditha massacre was compared to the Vietnam War’s My Lai massacre, and like the well-publicized and embarrassing Abu Ghraib scandal two years earlier, the attention it received made it seem as if it were a horrible aberration perpetrated by a few bad apples who might have overreacted to the stress they endured as occupiers.

In reality both Abu Ghraib and Haditha were merely more extreme versions of the day-to-day workings of the American occupation in Iraq, and what makes them unique is not so much how bad they were, or how embarrassing, but the fact that they made their way to the media and were publicized despite attempts to cover them up. Focusing on Abu Ghraib and Haditha distracts us from the daily, little Abu Ghraibs and small-scale Hadithas that have made up the occupation. The occupation has been one vast extended crime against the Iraqi people, and most of it has occurred unnoticed by the American people and the media.

Americans, led to believe that their soldiers and Marines would be welcomed as liberators by the Iraqi people, have no idea what the occupation is really like from the perspective of Iraqis who endure it. Although I am American, born and raised in New York City, I came closer to experiencing what it might feel like to be Iraqi than many of my colleagues. I often say that the secret to my success in Iraq as a journalist is my melanin advantage. I inherited my Iranian father’s Middle Eastern features, which allowed me to go unnoticed in Iraq, blend into crowds, march in demonstrations, sit in mosques, walk through Falluja’s worst neighborhoods.

I also benefited from being able to speak Arabic—in particular its Iraqi dialect, which I hastily learned in Baghdad upon my arrival and continued to develop throughout my time in Iraq.

My skin color and language skills allowed me to relate to the American occupier in a different way, for he looked at me as if I were just another haji, the “gook” of the war in Iraq. I first realized my advantage in April 2003, when I was sitting with a group of American soldiers and another soldier walked up and wondered what this haji (me) had done to get arrested by them. Later that summer I walked in the direction of an American tank and heard one soldier say about me, “That’s the biggest fuckin’ Iraqi (pronounced eye-raki) I ever saw.” A soldier by the gun said, “I don’t care how big he is, if he doesn’t stop movin’ I’m gonna shoot him.”

I was lucky enough to have an American passport in my pocket, which I promptly took out and waved, shouting: “Don’t shoot! I’m an American!” It was my first encounter with hostile American checkpoints but hardly my last, and I grew to fear the unpredictable American military, which could kill me for looking like an Iraqi male of fighting age. Countless Iraqis were not lucky enough to speak American English or carry a U.S. passport, and often entire families were killed in their cars when they approached American checkpoints.

In 2004 the British medical journal The Lancet estimated that by September 2004 100,000 Iraqis had died as a result of the American occupation and said that most of them had died violently, mostly in American airstrikes. Although this figure was challenged by many, especially partisans of the war, it seems perfectly plausible to me based on what I have seen in Iraq, having spent most of the postwar period there. What I never understood was why more journalists did not focus on this, choosing instead to look for the “good news” and go along with the official story.
[...]
I believe that any journalist who spent even a brief period embedded with American soldiers must have witnessed crimes being committed against innocent Iraqis, so I have always been baffled by how few were reported and how skeptically the Western media treated Arabic reports of such crimes. These crimes were not committed because Americans are bad or malicious; they were intrinsic to the occupation, and even if the Girl Scouts had occupied Iraq they would have resorted to these methods. In the end, it is those who dispatched decent young American men and women to commit crimes who should be held accountable.

Let's go back to The Weekly Standard's cite of Iraq Body Count's numbers to dispute Tim Robbins' assertion that "We've killed over 400,000 of their citizens."

"We've killed over 400,000 of their citizens." That's what actor Tim Robbins thinks U.S. troops have been doing in Iraq. He made the claim last week in an appearance on HBO's Real Time with Bill Maher.

He's wrong, of course. American soldiers have not been slaughtering 300 Iraqis a day for the last four years. Even for one of Hollywood's most feculent personalities, this is an appalling slander of U.S. troops.

The Iraq Body Count is an antiwar website that tallies all civilian deaths in Iraq as reported in the news media. Theirs is a comprehensive count that seeks to hold the United States and Britain accountable for a wide range of civilian deaths. As explained at iraqbodycount.org: "The count includes civilian deaths caused by coalition military action and by military or paramilitary responses to the coalition presence (e.g. insurgent and terrorist attacks). It also includes excess civilian deaths caused by criminal action resulting from the breakdown in law and order which followed the coalition invasion."

The antiwar group's "maximum count"? At the moment, 77,555. That's one-fifth the number concocted by Robbins's overactive imagination.

Iraq Body Count was not always the go-to source for The Weekly Standard or other right-wing publications when they wanted to dispute claims of high civilian casualty numbers. IBC only became reliable and trustworthy after The Lancet published the results of that second Johns Hopkins study indicating that up to half a million Iraqis had died from causes directly or indirectly related to the U.S. occupation.

Setting that aside, Iraq Body Count's fatality statistics come from published media reports -- as the WS piece itself acknowledges. So 77,555 is clearly no more than a sampling of civilian deaths, not the total number. IBC actually states this in so many words [my emphasis]:

What we are attempting to provide is a credible compilation of civilian deaths that have been reported by recognized sources. Our maximum therefore refers to reported deaths - which can only be a sample of true deaths unless one assumes that every civilian death has been reported. It is likely that many if not most civilian casualties will go unreported by the media.

Nevertheless, despite the fact that Iraq Body Count includes only reported deaths -- a fact WS acknowledges -- the piece still compares IBC's as-of-today 77,555 figure to a figure of "over 400,000" quoted by Tim Robbins (presumable a reference to the second Lancet/Johns Hopkins study) -- as if an estimate of reported civilian deaths in Iraq could be fairly or accurately compared to an estimate that surveyed individual households using a random cluster sample methodology.

The one thing of which we can be reasonably certain is that any attempt to quantify war-related civilian deaths in Iraq is going to be, at best, an educated guess. Whatever the estimate, it is far more likely to be an undercount than an overcount. Rather than trying to defend lowball estimates against highball estimates, we should be focusing on whether the war -- and specifically the escalation of the war -- is working to reduce civilian casualties or whether it's increasing them. Obviously, those people who favor continuing to escalate the war without requiring any accountability from those who are waging it will argue that civilians are benefiting from the escalation of hostilities. They will argue that civilian deaths are down -- in fact they are making that argument quite aggressively as I type these words.

But it's not true:

Bombings, sectarian slayings and other violence related to the war killed at least 1,773 Iraqi civilians in August, the second month in a row that civilian deaths have risen, according to government figures obtained Friday.

In July, the civilian death toll was 1,753, and in June it was 1,227. The numbers are based on morgue, hospital and police records and come from officials in the ministries of Health, Defense and the Interior. The statistics appear to indicate that the increase in troops ordered by President Bush this year has done little to curb civilian bloodshed, despite U.S. military statements to the contrary.

Military officials have said the security plan is showing progress because the number of attacks on civilians has decreased and sectarian killings have dropped. The security plan, which began in February, has put an additional 28,500 U.S. troops in Baghdad and other trouble spots.

The commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, Army Gen. David H. Petraeus, is expected to cite such indicators when he presents an assessment of the security plan to Congress this month.

The U.S. military says the numbers it gathers are lower than those provided by Iraqi ministries, but it does not release them. But it has said that the monthly civilian death toll from sectarian killings, which do not include all bombings, has dropped to about 1,000 per month from 1,200 per month early this year.

The latest Iraqi government figures show that from an initial drop in civilian deaths after the president's plan was launched Feb. 13, deaths quickly climbed back nearly to previous levels.

The numbers indicate that even if the number of attacks has dropped, their lethality may have increased.

The Los Angeles Times reports in a separate article that deadly cholera attacks are on the rise as a result of the filthy conditions in the refugee camps that are "home" to over a million internally displaced Iraqis:

A cholera outbreak in northern Iraq, where thousands of people have sought refuge from sectarian violence, is overwhelming hospitals and has killed as many as 10 people, health officials said Friday.

The outbreak in Sulaymaniya and Kirkuk is seen as the latest example of the displacement and deterioration of living conditions caused by the Iraqi conflict.

The water-borne disease has struck more than 80 people in the two cities, which are about 100 miles apart, said Claire Hajaj of the U.N. Children's Fund, or Unicef. She said cholera had been confirmed as the cause of five deaths and was suspected in five others.

Local officials said more than 2,000 people had been affected.

As the article points out, these cholera outbreaks are occurring because of environmental conditions that are directly caused by the war.

And this -- all of this; everything I have written here -- is the context in which Gen. David Petraeus (or one of his string-pullers in the White House) will report to Congress on 9/11 that "the surge" is working, that conditions are greatly improved, that the U.S. is "winning" the war. Juan Cole has some strong words for the Bush administration on that subject:

I personally find the controversy about Iraq in Washington to be bizarre. Are they really arguing about whether the situation is improving? I mean, you have the Night of the Living Dead over there. People lack potable water, cholera has broken out even in the good areas, a third of people are hungry, a doubling of the internally displaced to at least 1.1 million, and a million pilgrims dispersed just this week by militia infighting in a supposedly safe all-Shiite area. The government has all but collapsed, with even the formerly cooperative sections of the Sunni Arab political class withdrawing in a snit (much less more Sunni Arabs being brought in from the cold). The parliament hasn't actually passed any legislation to speak of and often cannot get a quorum. Corruption is endemic. The weapons we give the Iraqi army are often sold off to the insurgency. Some of our development aid goes to them, too.

The average number of Iraqis killed in 2007 per day exceeds those killed in 2006. Independent counts by news organizations do not agree with Pentagon estimates about drops in civilian deaths over-all. Nation-wide attacks in June reached a daily all-time high of 177.5. True, violence in Baghdad has been wrestled back down to the levels of summer, 2006 (hint: it wasn't paradise), but violence levels are up in the rest of the country. If you compare each month in 2006 with each month in 2007 with regard to US military deaths, the 2007 picture is dreadful.

I saw on CNN this smarmy Bush administration official come and and say that US troop deaths had fallen because of the surge, which is why we should support it. Just read the following chart bottom to top and compare 2006 month by month to 2007. US troop deaths haven't fallen. They are way up. Besides, they would be zero if the US were not occupying Iraq militarily, so if we should support a policy that leads to fewer troop deaths, that is the better policy.

Here are the US troop death via Icasualties.org.

8-2007 77 8-2006 65
7-2007 79 7-2006 43
6-2007 101 6-2006 61
5-2007 126 5-2006 69
4-2007 104 4-2006 76
3-2007 81 3-2006 31
2-2007 81 2-2006 55
1-2007 83 1-2006 62

I mean, how brain dead do the Bushies think we are, peddling this horse manure that US troop deaths have fallen? (There are always seasonal variations because in the summer it is 120 F. in the shade and guerrillas are too heat-exhausted to fight; but the summer 2007 numbers are much greater than those for summer 2006; that isn't progress.) And why does our corporate media keep repeating this Goebbels-like propaganda? Do we really live in an Orwellian state?

I'm at a conference. I would make a chart to illustrate the above if I had the time. Somebody else please do it. Maybe we bloggers can unite to keep the debate from being conducted on false premises for once.

(Thanks just a million to Kevin Drum at Washington Monthly and all the others who responded to my call for a graph here. It is striking when you see it that way. Look in comments for more such links.)

Repeat: US troop deaths in Iraq have not fallen and that is not a reason to support the troop escalation. And, violence in Iraq has not fallen because of the surge. Violence is way up this year.