04/08/13 – Muhammad Idrees Ahmad – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is my show, The Scott Horton Show.
You can find my full interview archive at scotthorton.org.
More than 2,700 of them going back to 2003.
And by the way, Friday will be the 10th anniversary of the start of the interview show.
And I'm going to play my interview with Alan Bach and you're going to see how both of us were right about everything about Iraq on the day Saddam's statue was pulled down in the great publicity stunt by the Marine Corps.
Anyway, that'll be Friday.
But our first guest on the show today is Muhammad Idris Ahmad.
And he wrote this thing here at thenational.ae.
It's called True Costs of Iraq War Whitewashed by Fuzzy Maths.
Welcome to the show, Muhammad.
How are you doing?
Good.
How are you?
I'm doing great.
Appreciate you joining us today.
My pleasure.
And I really appreciate this piece because this is something that's very important to me.
And, well, it's just very important, objectively, I assert, that a lot of people died in the Iraq War and that pretty much everyone in the media has this apparent fear of grappling with any kind of real estimate of the numbers and always go with the most ridiculous of lowballs, actually, that on their face couldn't possibly be right in, what, six, seven years of war, of hardcore fighting under the American occupation there.
So anyway, thank you for writing this wonderful article.
Could you please tell the audience what you mean of your own case for this?
Well, I was surprised by it that a few years back I read this book by two very well-respected Guardian journalists about WikiLeaks.
And now the interesting thing about it was that they mentioned the Iraq War and then they cite these numbers from this outfit based in London called Iraq Body Count.
And they cite the numbers, the thing that surprised me was that the Guardian's front page in 2006 had carried this big story about a study that had been published in The Lancet.
And it was carried out by this very well-respected epidemiological surveyor from the John Hopkins School, Bloomberg School of Medicine in the United States.
And now what happened is that this study was considered authoritative enough that even when the BBC acquired some documents about internal conversations inside the British government, so even they were worried because they knew that this cannot be rubbished.
This study is just too thorough, too robust.
So it can be studied, it can be rubbished.
And the numbers back then, this is June 2006, the numbers back then was 655,000 dead Iraqis.
Now the thing that they calculate was excess deaths, that how many people died because the war happened.
They're not talking about how many are dying out of violence, how many of other causes.
They're talking about that had the war not happened, how many people would still be living.
So the reason why they do that is that people discovered, not just in various previous wars, that a lot of people died not from the violence, but from secondary causes.
There are causes like just the breakdown of law and order.
There are causes like the shortage of medicine, shortage of food, starvation, and a whole lot of other consequences that happen because of wars.
And they do not usually get measured.
So that's why I give the examples in my article about how many other casualties, which now are well accepted in other wars, would have to be excluded if we adopt the methods that Iraq Body Count uses for counting the dead.
Because they say that they only count the dead who died out of violence and whose death has been reported in the press.
Initially, they used to rely only on English language press and they would only count as one dead if it was reported in at least two English language newspapers.
So there was an assumption there that all English language newspapers are everywhere in Iraq and they're counting every dead.
So anyway, the numbers methodologically were really dubious and that should have been obvious to everyone.
And yet it turns out that that number is the one that is cited most widely because it's the lowest figure.
And the reason why it's cited is precisely because it is just so palatable that it makes it sound like not that big of a tragedy.
I mean, even the numbers that they cite, about 110,000 people, even that is a pretty large human toll.
But what happens is that if people could account for the real consequences of the war, that how many people have actually been killed by this war, so then probably they'll have an appreciation of what war actually does and maybe they'll think twice about supporting a war in the future.
Well, and you know, I think maybe there's so many points to go over.
Luckily, we have plenty of time.
I think, well, I don't know what I think, but what do you think is the answer to this?
Out of the people who did die violently recorded, you know, either by the WikiLeaks or Rackbody count or the various other sources that are doing that kind of counting of the people who best they can tell died in combat one way or the other.
Do you have an estimate of what percentage of that was Iraqis who died in combat with the Americans versus with each other?
Say, for example, the Mahdi Army or the Bata Brigade killing Sunni insurgents or Sunni insurgents blowing up Shiite marketplaces and that kind of thing?
Well, certainly there was a spike in that kind of violence by late 2005.
So before that, I mean, we already had a figure in 2004, by which time there was no sectarian war.
So in 2004, when the first Lancet study was done, so even at that time already, 100,000 people had been killed.
So that is just in the first year of the war.
And since then, what happened is that then the big civil war started and that's the real spike came in mid 2006.
And there were six months in which there was intense violence.
And one of the things is that, again, we cannot just say that this is just Iraqis killing Iraqis because a lot of that violence was, again, planted.
Recently, Gaurian and the BBC did this investigation.
And it's not something new.
My friend Dar Jamal had reported on this in his book 2007 and in his reports back in 2004, that how the way the occupying forces were using sect and also ethnicity in order to create division so that it will make ruling easy.
I mean, it's also a new concept that has been used throughout the history of warfare, that you make life easy for yourself by, if there are any latent divisions in any society, you try to exploit them.
And that is what was happening, that when Fallujah was attacked, so all these soldiers from the Kurdish north, to the Peshmerga, and also the soldiers attached to the Bader brigades were brought in to fight.
And these are Shia soldiers attacking, or Kurdish soldiers attacking a Sunni neighborhood.
So whether it was intended that way or not, the consequence of that is that it creates or it intensifies those divisions.
There have been, I mean, the same sectarian divisions have existed for centuries, but they haven't led to that kind of bloodshed even in the past.
So obviously, that is also one of the consequences of the war.
Hmm.
Yeah, I guess, and nobody really does have a good estimate as to even on a year-by-year breakdown as to how many of the casualties would have been from direct combat with the Americans or from American-backed death squads, or just, you know, there's a lot of kidnapping and crime and people dying in violent ways that weren't even necessarily directly related to the combat.
But what I'm trying to get at is, in Chris Hedges' book, Collateral Damage, where it's broken down, it's all told from the point of view of American soldiers about atrocities that they were involved in.
And it's broken down by the house-to-house searches, the convoys, and I forget now, all the different kind of categories of action that had people dying.
And it sort of seemed in there that probably a good 51 or more percent of the Iraqis who were dying in the violence were dying directly at the hands of the American soldiers.
And, you know, like you're saying, the sectarian war, maybe that's only true for 04, 05, and then by 06 and 07, it was a lot more sectarian, civil war kind of casualties maybe, but nobody's really broken it down that well.
Am I right about that?
Yes, I think there have been some attempts at that.
But one of the reasons why I find that to be a sort of a distraction from the main debate is that it sort of displaces the responsibility from where it belongs down to people who are, you know, in wars, atrocities happen.
So if you send in soldiers into an alien society and give them the responsibility of suppressing them, so atrocities will naturally result.
Now, what happens is that the question, that's why it has to be placed at where the responsibility belongs.
It's the decision-making, that who made the decisions and who initiated it.
And this was recognized back in 2000, back at the end of the Second World War, when Justice Jackson spoke about that the supreme crime is the initiation of aggressive war, because everything else that follows, all the evil that follows, that accumulated evil of all of that is contained in that first act.
Because by going into a society, by breaking down their institutions, by removing their mechanisms of law and order, which take years and years, centuries to evolve.
So once you go in and destroy that, so then the responsibility can't be separated that, oh, these were killed by Iraqis and these were killed by our soldiers.
I mean, that separation should not be accepted because- On the other hand, though, it seems like, you know, a conservative kind of way of talking point, sort of way of looking at it here in America would be, well, geez, all we wanted to do was just show up and, you know, secure their mustard gas and create a little parliament for them.
Who knew they were such savages and all just couldn't wait to hack each other to bits.
It's not our fault that those dang, you know, Islams and Muslims can't just get along with each other.
And then that way, it's not our fault at all.
Geez, we just, we were totally taken by surprise.
We were almost innocent bystanders in the whole thing.
It was all on them.
Well, it isn't just the conservative way of talking.
Tony Blair appeared on The Daily Show and when he was asked about the Iraq war, he actually said exactly the same thing.
He said, oh, we only went with good intentions and they are killing each other and they are just extremists.
And the thing was that he got applause for that.
You know, so the thing is, that it's not just a conservative way of looking at it.
It's a good way to deflect responsibility.
Right.
The question always is, that would those people be doing the same thing if the initial act hadn't happened?
I mean, these people, obviously, I mean, the same question that also applies to the drone war, the U.S. drone war.
Whenever they make this distinction that here is this many militants killed and here is this many civilians, the question is, would all the people who are described as militants, would they be militants if the war wasn't happening?
Right.
And many people pick up guns precisely as a consequence of the situation that they have been put in.
So that choice wasn't theirs.
It has been imposed on them.
Yeah, no doubt about it.
Hey, the Bata Brigade and the Supreme Islamic Council, the Hakeem family and all them, they were living in Iran until 2003.
So would it have happened?
No, that's an absolute fact.
It would not have happened without the American invasion.
Simple as that.
Unless who knows what aliens came and abducted Saddam Hussein.
All right.
Now, so I want to talk about Les Roberts here real quick to get back to the excess deaths, because I think that can sound like fuzzy math to people in a way.
And I just kind of want to narrow that down a little bit.
I interviewed Les Roberts, who was one of, if not the main researcher on the research on the Lancet and Johns Hopkins studies there in 04 and in 06.
And I asked him about the sanctions and how if you're comparing excess deaths from 2003 through, say, I don't know, 2009 to, I don't know, 1991 through 2002, then still that's the era of the sanctions and blockade and total breakdown of the Iraqi economy, total deprivation for the Iraqi people.
So to compare excess deaths to that is a whole other magnitude than of people dying of this.
You're quite right.
There's actually an Australian statistician called Gideon Polia.
What he did was that he compared the excess deaths or the current death rate not to what the death rate was at the end of 12 years of sanction.
He compared it to the countries around Iraq.
And some of them are not nearly as wealthy as Iraq.
I mean, they don't have that kind of resources.
And the figure that he reached at that time, even when the Lancet study came out, was over a million.
So that is just using the same Lancet statistics, but changing the initial death rate.
I mean, basically the way the excess deaths are calculated is that you take, just before the war started, you take the mortality rate that out of 100, sorry, out of 1,000 people, how many people are being killed?
How many people are dying?
And then you compare it to the death rate three years into the war or at the present stage of the war.
And then the difference extrapolated for the rest of the population gives you the number of people who would not have died had the war not happened.
But the thing is, obviously, as you point out, that there's already something defective about it, because even the first death rate that is being calculated is at the end of 12 years of crippling sanctions.
Sanctions which had been described by two former UN secretaries of, SSN secretaries of, generals of the UN who resigned as Hans von Spahnek and Dennis Holliday, they had described it as genocidal.
And so obviously at the end of those 12 years, if you look at the death rate, it's already high.
So the comparison that you have is already defective in that respect.
So the actual death rate would have been rather different had there been no sanctions, because probably the health and the well-being of many more Iraqis would have been in a better shape.
All right.
Now, I also spoke with Alan Hyde from Opinion Business Research.
I noticed they went unmentioned in your article.
I guess you could explain why if you want.
But he's the guy that did the study at the end of 07 and concluded that a million people, a million Iraqis had died by the end of 2007.
And then I tried to get him on the show and his secretary informed me that, I'm sorry, actually he's decided to do the entire study again.
And he's not talking to the media until he's done doing it twice.
And I said, OK, fine.
And then about, say, four or five months later in the spring of 2008, he came out again and said, yep, a million have died by now.
And I wondered, was it just for space or was there a particular reason you excluded that?
Was there something problematic about that study?
Because I interviewed the guy and he seemed to know what he was talking about.
Yeah, that was a question of mainly, yes, space wasn't the key issue because 900 words and you can do a whole lot with that.
Yeah, I understand that.
This is an issue that I'll be returning to.
So actually, I'll be writing more about it.
Because the question is that it's something that I feel has been just simply, the media has just rolled over it and it has moved on.
And I want to make sure that a proper accounting is done.
So I will do all that I can.
I really appreciate opportunities like this that are talking to you that more people should be hearing about it.
And I think, frankly, I haven't studied the ORB poll in as depth as the original Lancet study because I was following the whole attacks that were coming in, that the way ORB was being attacked.
And incidentally, the people who have been most determined in attacking the Lancet study were the people associated with the Iraq body count.
And which I found very interesting because considering the Iraq body count presents itself as being an anti-war initiative and which presents itself as doing this fair accounting of what is happening in Iraq.
And if that were the case, so I find their attitude rather strange.
But because now they have published several journal articles and various places where they're attacking the Lancet study.
But the thing was that the terms of the attack were already in place because they immediately volunteered themselves to the media and started questioning, about raising questions which became useful talking points for detractors.
And actually they had absolutely no merit and they made accusations about how that there was a mainstream bias and there's this, there's that.
And actually, if there was any bias, it was that the methods were just too cautious.
Because, for example, when they were doing their first study, Fallujah had just recently been under assault.
So they excluded Fallujah altogether because they thought that, including Fallujah, might yield a much higher or a false, a number of which is much higher than usual because it might change the average.
And the same thing happened with the second study that was done by World Health Organization and the Iraqi Ministry of Health.
The problem with that one was that they dealt with it in a very interesting way.
That they had much more, they had a much larger sample, except it didn't really produce a much better number simply because what they were doing is that the places that they couldn't visit, the places that were most dangerous, so what they did is that they didn't visit those places and instead they used the Iraq body count statistics.
So which yielded a very odd situation that the places that were most violent according to them, according to their numbers, had a much lower death rate because they were using the Iraq body count numbers.
So it just presented a very distorted outcome.
But still, even their statistics results showed that there were at least 400,000 excess deaths by that time.
And now, I guess if you could, we still have a little bit of time, could you give examples for people so that they can imagine it in their mind's eye a little bit of just what we mean when you're talking about excess deaths just as far as, you know, grandmothers can't get medicine because it's too dangerous outside to go to the pharmacy or somebody falls and they can't get to the hospital in time to stop the bleeding.
Or, you know, these kinds of things where that counts.
You know, people are dying because they're living in, we turn their whole country into a war zone.
And so things that are even tangentially related, you can see how they would count as the excess death rate being much higher just because of the breakdown in plain old medicine being practiced, for example, or transportation or distribution of medicine, that kind of thing.
And also doctors, many of the doctors just went into exile because one of the things that was happening at the time was that intellectuals, professors, professionals of any variety were being attacked.
So what happened is that many people had gone into exile.
So many hospitals were running, but absolutely the minimal facilities that are imaginable.
And then what you had was also things like, you know, the best, one of the examples that I use is there was a fourfold increase in just traffic accidents after the war.
So how would you count them as a result of the death if you use the Iraq body count numbers?
Obviously not because they didn't die of violence.
But then I also use a counter example that during the Second World War, in the Nazi death marches, many people died of starvation.
If we use the Iraq body count method, so we cannot count them because they don't count as casualties of war.
Or for that matter, when there was an uprising in the Warsaw Ghetto, people picked up arms.
Obviously, it wasn't, it won't have been their first choice, but they had been put in a situation where they picked up arms.
But because they picked up arms, so suddenly they had become combatants.
And which means that the Iraq body count will also exclude them too.
They were not casualties of war either.
Right.
Just like our drone operators think when they're flying a drone over the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan, of all places, you know, they're in Texas.
Everybody's got a rifle.
Everybody.
But according to the drone operator, hey, if you got a rifle in your hand, you're fair game.
Well, that's the region that I hail from.
I'm from that border region.
And the thing is that you all, everybody by the time you were 10 or 12 years old, so you have a gun.
And most people by the age of, by the time they're 20, 21, so they have a beard, which means that if you are a drone operator, so you fit the profile and because they're using something called the pattern of life intelligence.
So from up above, it looks like, you know, you are the profile.
You have a gun, you have a beard, and you are maybe hanging out with some other people who have guns and beards.
So that is why I had also, incidentally, two years back before the Bureau of Investigative Journalism study came out, I had written an article about the bogus numbers, which were similarly being used to justify the drone war.
And again, because the same things are happening over there, you have these false distinctions that are being made about who is, for example, if you go to the New America Foundation's website, where they keep the drone statistics, you'll find that there's not even a category for civilians.
They have just this category in which they say, this many people died in drone strike, this many militants, and this many others.
So they don't have a, you know, so it's just militants or others.
So that is the only two categories that they have recognized.
So what has happened is that there is this very interesting way in which these labels have been used.
And obviously, calling somebody a militant now, if it carries a death sentence, so obviously you have to be a bit more careful about its use.
And in this case, there's no caution has been shown by the media.
I mean, because they have to consider the fact that all the reports that they receive about the drone attacks are from anonymous Pakistani and U.S. sources.
And one of the reasons why you can't expect either of them to tell the truth is because both the U.S., for obvious reasons, they're not going to admit that they just killed, you know, a whole home full of children.
And that's exactly one of the things that happened in, you know, there was this Madrasa.
Madrasa, basically, the only type of school that is available over there.
It's a seminary.
And what happened is that you had about 60 children killed just in one drone strike.
And the reason the Pakistanis don't admit is simple, because one, they don't want to be seen as being complicit.
And secondly, if there are civilian deaths reported, it has consequences for them, too.
It's a very unpopular position inside Pakistan.
So the government doesn't want to be seen as participating in the slaughter of civilians.
All right.
Now, I want to get back to what you said about all these lowball estimates, really justifying what's happening in the minds of the American people.
I mean, hell, when it comes to a drone war in Pakistan, I bet you 10 percent of Americans even know that there is such a thing.
But back to the Iraq war for a minute, though.
Here, this thing got really bad there for a while, where even the Democrats ended up winning both houses of Congress over it in the elections of 2006.
And the American people, after about five or six years, finally decided they didn't actually even like George W. Bush.
And maybe he wasn't that good at waging wars after all.
And that kind of thing.
And yet, a hundred thousand.
That doesn't sound like that big of a number compared to.
And you hear this even if you complain about American soldier casualties.
People say that many people died in 10 minutes in World War One and that kind of thing.
And and so people say, hey, you know what?
For a decade long, complete catastrophe, Mesopotamia, as Jon Stewart called it and all that.
Hundred thousand doesn't sound that bad, really.
I'm not sure if I got a Vietnam syndrome from this one.
Maybe maybe we could try again in Iran, huh?
Well, I think you're quite right about that.
There's actually a great book on that subject by a person you might have had on your show, John Turman.
He has this book called The Deaths of Others.
And the thing the argument he makes is that until it becomes costly for the population waging the war for the American population.
So then it's not taken as anything that there that is of their concern.
So, for example, if it had been just soldiers dying, I don't think that this war would have ended.
It was just because the economy went to dogs that that's when people started feeling it in their pockets.
And also what it did was that it removed the war from the headlines.
You know, the economy became the bigger issue.
And that's why Obama was seen as, you know, probably that this guy will manage it better than his competitor.
And that's why people end up putting all their hopes in him.
And but the thing was that by that time, everybody, one of the things which is, I think, which has just completely lost in this whole debate is that by the end of 2006, you had the realist camp led by people like Baker and Hamilton and all that were already at that time recommending a pullout and which was never pursued because, you know, the neocons once again won over at that time.
So what has happened is that because one of the things was that the debate the neocons could easily win at that time because of the popular sentiment, although in elections it showed, but because the Democrats never could come out and make it into an issue, which was, you know, other than you had just a few prominent Democrats who were willing to come out and openly speak out against it.
And most of them were in on it, but really couldn't.
Yeah, most of them were in on it, especially at that time, Hillary Clinton was their favorite for 2008.
And she was up to her eyeballs in the Iraq war going back to 1992, 93.
So.
Yeah, so so I think that it only if it ended, it's only because and people had just simply moved on and because they had bigger concerns now, it finally was hitting them in the pockets.
And that's why people could, if it was just some, you know, soldiers being killed.
So I don't think that they would have ended at any time.
And yes, as you point out, that there will be still those excuses.
The wall for 5000 compared to Vietnam.
That's nothing.
Right.
And so I think that it's it's only because of the economy.
And speaking of which, Linda Billman is one of the coauthors with Joseph Stiglitz of that great book about the real economic cost of the war has just published a study and which I would recommend to your listeners.
Because she's pointing out that the actual costs of the war are considerably higher than that, even from the estimate that they had first produced.
Right.
Yeah, they first came out and they came out with their book, the three trillion dollar war.
And then immediately they wrote an op ed for The Washington Post saying, oops, we should have said five.
And now they're talking more like six or seven trillion dollars for this war, which I don't know if people remember back right around this time.
Ten years ago, the news came out that Bush was asking for eighty seven billion dollars for the war.
And the whole country went eighty seven billion.
I thought you said it was going to be free.
Now is the original sticker price shock was over a measly less than 100 billion dollar bill for this thing.
Anyway, I just thought that was funny.
But I wanted to mention real quick there about that excuse that I might be Pollyanna about this.
But I like to believe, Mohammed, maybe I'm wrong.
I probably am.
But I like to believe that if the American people always heard about the Iraq war in the context that, yes, somewhere between seven hundred thousand and a million people died in this thing.
So shut up.
If that was the way, the context that they always heard about it, then I'd like to believe it would have a little bit different reputation, that it wouldn't just be because the economy crashed that they care.
But because, geez, are you serious?
Because you know what?
I knew a guy who was pro war.
And in 2004, I told him, did you hear?
There's a new study said one hundred thousand people have died in this thing.
And he said, oh, God, really?
And he started changing his mind about the war right then and there.
And before he had rationalized that we're going to make a better place out of Iraq.
You'll see.
It'll be all right.
This, that, the other.
And I said, well, how many how many dead innocents is worth it?
Right now, it's one hundred thousand.
And right then and there, he started rethinking that.
That's a lot for even 2004.
So maybe it's silly, but I like to believe if the American people had anything like the straight dope about this, that their opinions would be a little bit better, too, you know?
No, I agree.
You completely agree.
I mean, because the thing is that if it was the real cost was being reported.
So I don't think a Cheney or a Tony Blair could come on TV and say that, you know, he has no regrets.
So I think that the lowballing has had serious it has seriously distorted the debate.
And in fact, it makes more wars, you know, that it enables more wars, because if people were aware that what happened, what truly happened, what the costs were for others and what the cost for them.
So it is likely that in the future they will show greater caution or for that matter, they will be at least more vocal in their opposition to war.
Agreed.
Absolutely.
All right.
Well, thank you very much for your time on the show and for this great article.
I really appreciate it.
My pleasure.
All right, everybody.
That is Mohammed Idrees Ahmad.
And the article is at the national dot a e true costs of Iraq war whitewashed by fuzzy maths.
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