I'm your host, Scott Horton, and we're going to go straight to our first guest today.
It's Fred Bronfman.
He wrote this great piece at Alternet, probably heard me talk about it on the show yesterday.
Five million Iraqis killed, maimed, tortured, displaced.
Think that bothers war boosters like Christopher Hitchens?
Welcome to the show, Fred.
How are you?
I'm fine.
I appreciate you joining us today.
Thank you.
I kind of wanted to keep Hitchens as a minimal part of this discussion, but that's probably not a very good idea.
In fact, on one of the feeds, we are simulcasting here.
We just played a song that was an anti-war song from 2002.
The point of the song, basically, is, I don't care about those Iraqis.
All these politicians are trying to get me to care about them so much that we go and have a war over there, but I don't want to, basically.
Screw them.
Let's not have a war on their behalf.
That was a reaction to the propaganda as it was being pushed down all of our eye holes and in our ear holes in 2002, led by the likes of Christopher Hitchens, that America needs to launch an aggressive war against Iraq to help those people.
Yeah, I mean, I came across an Amnesty International report that I hadn't really realized this or hadn't thought about it because the propaganda is so strong that in 2002, according to Amnesty International, there were only scores of people, that is to say several dozen people, perhaps let's say under a hundred, who were actually being killed in Iraq by the Saddam Hussein dictatorship for political reasons and so forth and so on.
So the real comparison, you know, what Christopher did and the other folks who were supporting the war was add up all of Saddam's crimes over the previous 20 years, talk about the weapons of mass destruction and sound like we had to go in to help the Iraqi people.
What actually happened is instead of several dozens of people dying because of Saddam's absolute evil, we've created five million people, as you mentioned, five million war victims and that's the proper comparison between scores and millions.
Yeah, and even when, as you say, to talk about the hundreds of thousands is to concede as though it's really a concession to the war party that Saddam Hussein was in fact an evil murderous dictator, but as you say, the worst of those crimes really, I mean, other than the invasion of Iran, which America was behind him the whole time during that, and some say even gave him the green light to get it started, but his worst crimes against his own people really, if I know my Iraqi history very well, it was the Anfal campaign against the Kurds and that was in 1984 or something, right?
Well, he was an evil dictator, he did torture people, there were mass graves, all of that's absolutely true, but the notion that we should go into Iraq to help the Iraqi people was absolutely false, that is to say, we've hurt many more Iraqis than we've helped, and secondly, which I find most disturbing about Christopher, and by the way, all of the liberal war hawks, of which there are several dozen, I focus on my article on the liberal war hawks because unlike the right, who don't even pretend to care about the Iraqi people, it was the liberal war hawks, the so-called centrists, who claim to care about the Iraqi people, who use that as their primary justification for us going to war, to free them from the evil Saddam, who, as I say, was evil.
But it's unbelievable that in the seven years since, you read almost nothing from these very people who claim to care about the Iraqi people, they've said almost nothing, and Christopher is the worst example, about the very same Iraqi people, the millions of them, who, in my opinion, who they have some of their blood on their hands, they're partially responsible for this invasion.
Christopher actually praises himself, he takes credit for having helped cause the invasion.
To me, it's very different, when you support violence by your government, it seems to me you take on a moral responsibility for the civilians who are going to get killed from that violence.
It's not like taking a position on gay marriage, or the BP oil spill, or Wall Street financial reform.
It's a very special issue, and what bothers me most about the folk, particularly the liberal war hawks who justify the invasion, on behalf of the Iraqi people, they've shown absolute no concern for the millions who have suffered indescribably since the invasion.
And by the way, they could have had a much bigger, if they had cared about the civilians, they could have had an enormous impact.
They should have been the first ones yelling about the need to provide law and order.
Under international law, if I was against the invasion, but if we are going to go in there and occupy them, it's a crime not to provide law and order.
And none of these people who could have had a tremendous influence, I mean, here's Christopher bragging about going over to Iraq with Paul Wolfowitz, who he befriended and greatly admired, there's nothing in his memoirs or in the historical record where Hitchens was lobbying for us providing law and order, economic, you know, keeping the economy intact, providing humanitarian aid to these millions of Iraqis who have suffered terribly.
And it's that that I'm personally most upset about.
And the other side of this that I think I'd like to really emphasize, Scott, because I think there's a much bigger issue here that goes way beyond Christopher.
I don't think Christopher is the worst culprit at all, though he's made a lot of noise.
The George Bush, Dick Cheney, the people actually made the war, are the worst culprits.
But I think what Christopher symbolizes and what I find most frightening about the age in which we live is what I call in my article, we're living now in an age of non-humanity, not inhumanity.
Inhumanity was Hitler hating Jews.
He made no secret about it.
He went after the Jews.
In the case, a case like Iraq and certainly Indochina, which I live through, the people who are killing innocent civilians don't hate them, they have nothing against them.
They simply don't care.
They have declared them non-people.
Their lives don't exist there.
They don't.
They're not part of the equation.
And this is what I find most frightening.
And I think we as Americans should find it frightening, because not only is it immoral, but the same people who are indifferent to the lives of civilians in Iraq are indifferent to the non-people in America.
And even if you feel you're not a non-peer person, anyone listening to this program, because you have money or you write articles, you know, it's the...
In the best example, that was the Wall Street crash, where you have these rich guys on Wall Street tricking the poorest people in our society out of their life savings, telling them, give me your life savings, you'll get a house out of the deal.
Then a couple of years later, they foreclose on them, the people lose their house and lose their life savings.
They were treating them as non-people.
Yeah, well, and I'm here to tell you, as someone who scans the news, you know, all day, every day, that it's virtually a daily occurrence that some guy kills his kids, his wife, and then himself, after losing everything.
And just to kind of, you know, chime in on your argument there, I think that, you know, those people on Wall Street who dupe these people never lose a bit of sleep over it.
In fact, Russell Means, the great Indian activist, said on this show, you people are the Indians of the 21st century.
That's very sad, but you better get used to that idea, and I think you're absolutely right.
The American people, I think even including the millionaires, I think everybody but the billionaires, we're all non-humans to be, you know, used up, thrown away, like an American army private or an Iraqi, and I don't think there's really much doubt about that.
Now, when we come back from the break, I want to ask you specifically, I'd like to go through some of these statistics about what really has been the result of the American war on the people of Iraq, because as we know, they don't talk about it on TV, and if it's not on TV, most people have no idea.
So I'd like to give them an idea of some of these stats, but we're about to go out to break here.
I guess I'd like to get your comment real quickly, if I could, about my criticism that most of the anti-war left that opposed the war in 2002 were being quite dishonest, that if it had been Clinton, they would have been for it, and now that it's Obama, they don't care at all.
Would you agree with that?
Let's start after the break.
I want to ask everyone during the break who might be listening to ask one single question.
Too late.
Too late.
Sorry.
Sorry, Fred.
Too late.
We're at the break now.
We'll come back then.
Okay.
Bye, then.
You can watch the LRN Studio Cam and chat with other listeners anytime at cam.lrn.fm.
That's cam.lrn.fm.
All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm talking with Fred Bronfman.
He's an anti-war activist and author of a number of books about the Indochina War, the Third Indochina War, The Old Man, a biographical account of a Lao villager, Voices from the Plain of Jars, Life Under an Air War, Life Under the Bombs, Project Air War, and on like that.
We're talking about Iraq now.
Fred, I'm sorry because I asked you this question right leading up to the break there.
I'm terrible with these hard breaks.
I was asking about the disingenuousness of the anti-war left who didn't want a Republican, George Bush, oil company war in Iraq.
Basically, I think if Bill Clinton had said, yes, we're going to wage war to save the people of Iraq and give them a democracy and whatever, they would have gone for it.
The fact that Obama's in power now and the anti-war left is largely silent would seem to be proof of that.
What do you think?
I think there's some truth to that, but I think the deeper problem we have, which I think we all need to face, is that a very small number of people in our society have an enormous number of power and the rest of us are powerless.
I think the fundamental reason there hasn't been more of an anti-war movement is that millions of us marched against the Iraq war, George Bush went into it, and we felt it would be hopeless to continue doing so.
Perhaps they'd be doing a little more if, what's his name, McCain was president now, but I think certainly in terms of the masses of people, it's a much deeper problem where people feel it's hopeless, people feel there's no point.
This is, I think, the fundamental issue we have to face.
The question I was going to ask anybody listening to this audience is a very simple, this is a factual question.
Which country's leaders have killed, wounded, maimed, displaced, impoverished, and imprisoned and tortured more of its non-citizens than any other country?
Which country's leaders have done that to the most civilians since the end of World War II?
Now, I've asked that question to an awful lot of people.
Very few people automatically say, well, of course, American leaders.
In fact, American leaders have created more civilian victims since the end of World War II, outside their own country, than all the rest of the world's leaders put together.
The number right now, I would estimate, is upwards of 30 million, made somewhere between 30 and 50 million people as a direct or indirect result, you know, our support for dictators, the people we've killed directly, the people we've made homeless, has mounted into the tens of millions.
And what's most scary to me about the time in which we live, is that Americans don't know this.
Somehow, we've entered a 1984-like situation, in which, as a result of myth-making by the mass media and so forth, our leaders kill millions, and yet their own citizens don't even know about it, are completely unaware of it.
It's not part of their cognitive framework.
And I think this is the number one issue for all of us, is to face up to the fact that we are living, the closest parallel to America today is in fiction, in fact, in 1984, in which an entire population is brainwashed, its leaders wage automated war on the far frontiers of which the average man is unaware, that's a quote.
And it's a very, very dangerous situation, particularly if, as I believe, and I've worked mainly on the economy for the last 20 years, if the American economy goes down the tubes, which is what I think is going to happen over the next decade, and Paul Krugman just, what do you call it, predicted a third depression, a global depression this time, I think America's going to become a very ugly place.
I don't think you have the same social consensus you had in the 30s for creating humane policies at home.
I also think that the elites are so committed to this war-making abroad that they're very likely to turn America into a police state to protect their own interests.
This is what we need to mobilize, this is the level of discussion we need to start having now and not get hung up on President Obama versus, you know, the next guy.
There's nothing, in my opinion, Obama could do, I don't know him personally, he may be the greatest guy in the world, I don't think there's very much he can do when you really get into these core issues of war-making, climate change, saving the American economy and creating some kind of a welfare state that will allow most Americans to live over the next 10 years.
Well, yeah, I mean, there's definitely a lot there, but I'm agreed with you that I think that the empire will be the last thing to go if they have to consume every bit of what private citizens in this country can produce, tax each one of us out of our homes, they'll do that before they get the troops out of Central Asia, even though it should be obvious to everyone that when we're bankrupt, when our empire's bankrupted us, the first thing we ought to do is bring our troops home.
That's the number one, quickest way to save money.
But everybody wants to be like Roosevelt and believe that a war is good for the economy.
We need to take trillions of dollars and turn them into high explosives and destroy wealth and lives with them.
Somehow that makes us all rich.
Let me tell you what I think, Scott, to put this as bluntly as I can, to try to communicate how I feel about this situation, Wall Street bankrupted this economy and then paid themselves the largest, among the largest bonuses in their history, as millions of Americans were going hungry, going without jobs, losing their homes.
In my humble opinion, Wall Street leading the charge, but more generally, the elites in this country, not because they're bad people, not because they hate dogs, not because they hate Jews, but simply because they're interested primarily in their careers and their short-term profit and short-term success of their institution and their role within the institution have declared war against the rest of us.
We are at war.
We don't realize that yet.
There is no question that the elites in this country have already demonstrated that their primary goal is to secure their own power, wealth, and influence at the expense of the rest of us.
I think this is what we need to wake up to, that we are at war in America, and that the elites have declared war against us.
We didn't declare war against them, unfortunately.
We didn't preclude them from taking their bonuses.
They decided to take those bonuses instead of all the other good things they could have done with it, from paying higher taxes, or agreeing to pay higher taxes, to promoting jobs, to investing in a clean energy revolution.
Well, and the thing is, too, if they're at war with us, we can just look at the statistics in your article today, and I'm sorry we're not going to have time to go through them here.
The bumper music's about to start playing, but we'll be lucky if we get off as easy as the Iraqis.
Five million refugees, at least a million dead, according to opinion business research.
Still, the electricity doesn't work, the sewage, the water systems are broken.
From a single disturbing statistic, Scott, the Americans have right now 100,000 people in jail.
The Vice President of Iraq says that the vast majority are innocent.
We are torturing these people, we've put them in jail, and the American jailers say we will not give them trials, because we have no evidence to prove that they're guilty.
I'm sorry, we're all out of time here, Fred.
Everybody, go read Fred Bronfman, Alternet.
Damn, did it again.
Okay.
Thanks very much for your time.
Appreciate it.
Hey, thanks a lot.
Anytime, man.
Listen to LRN.
FM on any phone, anytime, 760-569-7753.
That's 760-569-7753.
All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
This is Antiwar Radio, and you know what?
These segments are too short.
I still want to talk with Fred about all the terrible things that happened to the people of Iraq, and we didn't really get to cover it, so I've kept him over here.
Hopefully, we'll be able to get Gareth, bump him 10 minutes, and then continue on with the show.
All right, Fred, welcome back.
The article, again, everyone, is 5 million Iraqis killed, maimed, tortured, displaced.
Now, let's go through some of these statistics here.
What do you know?
How can you show it, etc.?
Okay, well, first of all, just for the record, this is the equivalent.
By proportion of population, this would be as if 60 million Americans were currently either murdered, maimed, displaced, or imprisoned.
And in addition, there are many millions more who have been totally impoverished.
Even though they're still in their homes, they're not technically refugees, they can barely survive.
We've probably destroyed about half the nation.
Now, the statistics, just for the sources here, I don't like to toss numbers around.
The Iraqi body count has documented 100,000 civilian deaths.
Their figures indicate that, from their perspective, the total number might be 200,000 to 300,000.
The group you just mentioned, the opinion research groups, puts the number at something over a million.
Well, let me jump in right here, too.
When Opinion Business Research first did their study in the fall of 2007, I believe it was, I tried to interview Alan Hyde on the show, and we almost had it worked out, but then he delayed and delayed, and then it turned out, no, you know what, we decided that number is so high, we want to do it again.
And so he sent his people back, and they did the research all over again, and they came out in the spring of 2008 and said, yep, a million.
And by the way, just for the record, that guy Alan Hyde, the director of Opinion Business Research, he put up the money himself.
It's his own company.
It's not their specialty, but they use the exact methods that they use when they're counting the dead in Rwanda or anywhere else, when the British and the Americans are counting the dead.
And it was not paid for by George Soros or anything like that.
And they double-checked it.
He went, nah, that number's so high, let's go back and make sure.
And they made sure, and he said, yeah, a million.
Excess deaths over the rate of death from before the invasion.
Yeah, well, I personally don't feel comfortable getting into the numbers, because I'm not a statistician.
I don't think it matters if it's 300,000 or 900,000 from my perspective.
What does matter to me is that our leaders have killed hundreds of thousands of innocent human beings, children, women, men, and have shown no interest themselves in tabulating the number of innocent civilians they kill.
Well, in fact, General Colin Powell and General Tommy Franks on separate occasions have said, jokingly, we don't do civilians.
They kill civilians, but they don't bother to ascertain who among all the people they killed are civilians or military.
I think this is a startling example of non-humanity, which, again, I think is the key theme out of all of this, that we've declared most of the world's people non-people.
Now, in addition to the immorality of that, we now have a new situation in today's globalized and interconnected world called terrorism, refugees, and many other aspects that are actually affecting American life very directly and will affect it even more in coming years.
You know, George Bush's famous quote, why do they hate us?
They hate our way of life.
The reason they hate us is we kill them.
The American people don't know that we kill tens of millions of people.
We have killed, excuse me, our leaders have killed tens of millions of people since the end of World War II.
I'm sorry, Fred, just in the interest of time here, let's focus it back on Iraq.
Let's talk about orphans.
Let's talk about wounded.
Let's talk about internal and external refugees, how they're living now, the electricity.
This is the war, this is the war that you and I have both heard ten million people say ten million times, oh, the people of Iraq are way better off now without Saddam Hussein.
No, that's ridiculous.
I mean, that's actually, well...
So let's show them.
Let's talk about orphans and wounded and post-traumatic stress and refugees.
You know, according to the United Nations Commission on Human Rights, nearly five million Iraqis right now, excuse me, total, have been made refugees.
At this point, they say they're roughly 3.5 million.
So there are 3.5 million human beings living like animals in tents, living in foreign countries.
There are stories of middle class university professor, his daughter becomes a prostitute to support the family because he can't get a job in Syria.
We have 100,000 people presently in American-run prisons who the vice president of Iraq says are innocent.
Every one of the hundreds of thousands we've murdered, the general rule of thumb is we've wounded two.
So in addition to, let's say, the 200,000 we've murdered at a minimum, up to a million, we've wounded 400,000 to two million.
In addition to that, you have the people even in Baghdad get electricity an hour a day.
Now, your average American would be pretty upset if he only had electricity an hour a day.
But what if he was living in 113-degree weather?
A huge number of Iraqis, I forget the exact number, do not have drinking water, safe drinking water.
The unofficial jobless rate is something like 30%, or at least as high as 30%.
So we've inflicted unbelievable suffering.
Just translate these.
These are numbers for Americans would be as if we had 60 million refugees, millions of Americans murdered, tens of millions of Americans going without water and electricity and jobs and just selling everything they own just to get food for their children.
The pain and suffering that we've inflicted upon the, that we're directly responsible for or indirectly by not providing law and order, and thereby allowing the bloodletting to go on between the Shiites and Sunnis, is of catastrophic proportions.
In addition to that, as you probably know, prior to the invasion, as a result of Bill Clinton's sanctions, an estimated 1 to 1.5 million Iraqis, largely children, died.
Now, if you think that's just some leftist propaganda, that was the statement by the UN person in charge, Dennis Holliday was in charge of inflicting the sanctions.
And then when he realized that it was mainly children who were being denied medicine who were dying...
Well, and it's worth pointing out too that when we talk about the excess deaths after the invasion, that's compared to under the era of the blockade.
So I think anyone listening to this radio show, presumably they read the newspapers, how many of us knew that?
I didn't know that, honestly speaking, until I began researching this article.
I had no idea of the catastrophic suffering we'd inflicted on the people of Iraq.
And this is, to me, the second issue.
Number one, we inflict the suffering.
Number two, we're entirely indifferent to it.
We don't report it.
We don't care about it.
Another point I made in my article is there are a couple of very courageous reporters, like Chris Hedges.
Anyone who wants to know what's going on in Iraq should read a book called Collateral Damage, by Chris Hedges, who's a Pulitzer Prize winning reporter.
He went out and interviewed American soldiers and found out about the large numbers of civilians they wound up killing.
Ninety-nine percent of our reporters just go around with our military.
They never even talk to any Iraqis.
They don't care.
Nobody's pushing them to talk to Iraqis.
They're certainly not Iraqi victims.
Five million people have been made refugees.
How many stories have you read in the newspaper about Iraqi refugees and what their lives are like, and what they're like as human beings, compared to the number of stories you read about the elections or something?
The notion that this is a democracy is the most ridiculous notion of all.
The people who are experiencing democracy are the politicians who get paid to run for office.
The Iraqi people obviously don't have a democracy.
If they're not getting their oil money or the help that they need to survive, it's because the democracy is their number one priority.
We're out of time.
Thanks very much.
Well, thank you, and thanks for having me back.
Everybody check out Fred Bronfman's article at Alternate.
Five million Iraqis killed, maimed, tortured, displaced.
