All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
Our next guest on the show today is John Tierman.
He is executive director of MIT's Center for International Studies.
His new book, The Death of Others, The Fate of Civilians in America's Wars, just came out in July, released by Oxford Press.
Welcome to the show, John, how are you doing?
Very well, thanks.
Well, I appreciate you joining us today, and I really appreciate you writing this article, too.
I hope a couple, a few hundred million eyeballs see it.
Two or three of the population of America, that's who I'm interested in, that they see it.
One million dead in Iraq, six reasons the media hide the true human toll of war, and why we let them.
So first of all, you really lay it out well in this article here, John.
Could you make the case as to how you believe there's anything like a million dead from the Iraq War?
Well, yeah, it might be a million.
We don't know exactly, but we had done, about almost five years ago now, a household survey, which is like a poll, a randomized selection of houses in Iraq, ask them questions about what's happened to their families in the war, and then make an estimate from those responses.
And at that time, the estimate was about 650,000, and there was still quite a bit of killing to come.
And there have been other household surveys done by other organizations, which also had very high numbers.
It's a guesswork, because there have been no household surveys since then.
But my sense of things is at least 700,000, 800,000, and maybe as much as a million.
Well, I guess the last one was in the early spring of 2008, right, when Opinion Business Research did their second study.
Yeah, they have a British polling firm.
There were some questions about how rigorous it was, but they did get over a million around that time in their household survey.
I think if you sort of took the average of all these household surveys and then sort of used the trend lines of Iraq body count, which is a very conservative estimate, then you would get up close to a million.
It's well into the hundreds of thousands, that's for sure.
Well, I tried to interview Alan Hyde from Opinion Business Research in the fall of 2007 when they did their first study.
And they actually answered back.
It took a while to get an answer back.
When they answered back, they said, well, he's decided to do it again.
So they did the study again.
And then they still got the same conclusion, a million.
Well, it could be valid.
It's just a little hard to say.
It's very hard to do these kinds of surveys during wartime.
And I think that that accounts for some of the differences in the results.
But the point is that the lowest result from the household survey five years ago was 400,000.
And as I said, there was a lot of killing after that.
Well, and that's not all just shot by American soldiers.
That's the excess deaths.
So that includes people who couldn't get to the hospital for all the checkpoints and roadblocks or die from an easily curable disease in a normal time, that kind of thing.
All Iraqis, yeah, too, not just civilians.
But the point is that war creates havoc in lots of ways.
It's not just direct violence.
It's also what we call structural violence, as you were just describing.
And I think they need to be counted as well.
And also in Iraq, the idea of who's a civilian, who's not a civilian, sometimes gets a little fuzzy, this line.
And so I think it's better just to count all Iraqis rather than try to differentiate who's a bystander and who isn't.
Right, in essence, what we're talking about is comparing the death rate from before and after and saying, this is how much it increased, that kind of thing.
That's right.
But now, so on to Anderson Cooper.
Now, I have a theory about why Anderson Cooper would only say tens of thousands, as you point out in the story here.
My theory is that he doesn't know the first thing about it.
He doesn't sit around and read antiwar.com or alternate.org or anything like that.
He's heard once, out loud, someone told him it's about tens of thousands.
And so that's all he knows.
And then he goes on TV and says so.
And that's what the rest of America thinks, too, then.
What do you think of my awesome theory?
Well, I don't know specifically about him.
But I think that the problem generally with the news media is that they have not really looked at it carefully.
That, I think, is true.
A few editors, a few reporters took up the Johns Hopkins survey, which is the one that I commissioned in 2006, and others, but have not really engaged in why these are done the way they're done.
Are they more plausible than the simple counts that are done from English language, news media stories, and so on?
And so they kind of throw up their hands and say, OK, well, we'll just give the bottom line here, I mean, the lowest number, because that's the safest thing to do.
And it's still a high number, of course, even if it's 100,000, which is what Iraq Body Count has.
It's a lot of people.
So I think they feel safe saying that.
And that's the way they go with the controversy.
Unfortunately, I think that this caution, or it's not even a caution necessarily now, it's just kind of a rote response, devalues not only Iraqi lives, but really gives us the wrong lessons about the war.
And those lessons, of course, are, among them at least, are the catastrophic consequences for Iraqis and what America did in a war of choice.
And I'm afraid that what will happen out of this, among other things, is that we'll feel that it's easier to go in the next time if we feel only tens of thousands died in this one.
Right.
Well, and now, how widespread is it?
I pick on Anderson Cooper, just because I think I read his name in your piece there.
But he's a stand-in for all the rest of them on cable TV news anyway.
I don't differentiate.
But this basically is, if we were to pick up one of the major newspapers, The Wall Street Journal, or the LA Times, or turn it to CNN, this is what they would say if they ever addressed the issue.
It would be tens of thousands.
That's right.
Never hundreds.
I've rarely said, once in a while, you see some reporter mention that it could be in the hundreds of thousands.
It's kind of rare.
Yeah.
Well, and it really is incredible.
And especially because, as you note, Iraq body count counts more than that, above 100,000 now.
And we've had the WikiLeaks, where we know now that the military's real numbers were 100,000.
And I spoke with one of the guys who, I'm sorry, I forget his name.
I'm sure you know him.
I didn't realize you were the guy that had initiated that 2006 study.
But he talked about, on the show, the difference when he went to Iraq body count, and then he went through the military's numbers.
He found that there were these whole other sets of dead civilians who had been counted by the military, and that they had lied about that, added up, that basically were consistent with the numbers from the two John Hopkins Lancet studies, and then the Opinion Business Research study.
Right.
When you take their own, the military's own information.
Well, there was probably Les Roberts at Columbia.
Right, yeah, yeah, exactly.
Could you explain that better than I just tried to, please?
Well, I think what I understand it, to some extent, they're revising that particular calculation, and they'll come out later in the year with a scientific article on it.
But it's basically looking for, in both the Iraq body count and the US documents that were released by WikiLeaks, there was a certain amount of overlap.
And if you actually count the overlap, if you really look at each incident and code it, you'll find that it's maybe only a third, if I remember correctly, overlapped.
So that means if you do all the calculations, really well over 300,000 dead in this particular set of documents.
And the thing is that, even with these documents, all you're getting is reports that have been issued by the government.
That is, these are from, on the WikiLeaks side, it is US military personnel that are reporting what they have heard or have seen.
In other words, in their after-action reports, their daily reports to their commanding officers, there's a lot that goes on that US military did not see.
Lots and lots of killing outside the view of the US military.
So they only saw a part of the picture.
And the same is true of the Iraq body count numbers.
They are counting what is in the news media, English language news media, coming out of Iraq, and a couple of other sources, like morgue reports from Baghdad.
That is also an incomplete picture, because a lot goes on outside the view of the news media.
So this is what we call passive surveillance, that people who are doing accounting are just using numbers as they are reported to them, in effect, whereas the household surveys goes out and asks the question in a nationwide survey.
So that's why I think the latter, the household surveys, are much more accurate.
And yet, we've been sort of led to believe that these lower numbers are more accurate.
They're not.
They're a minimum, and they're counted only in a certain kind of way that leaves out a great deal.
You basically don't know what you're not counting, and that's why the surveys are superior method.
Right.
It's John Tierman, everyone.
He is executive director of MIT's Center for International Studies.
His new book is The Death of Others, The Fate of Civilians in America's Wars.
And his new piece at Alternet is called One Million Dead in Iraq.
We'll be right back after this.
All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm talking with John Tierman, executive director of MIT's Center for International Studies, author of the new book, The Deaths of Others, The Fate of Civilians in America's Wars, just out.
He's got a new piece at Alternet.org, One Million Dead in Iraq, Six Reasons the Media Hide the Human Toll of War.
And can you tell us some more about those six reasons there, because I like this sort of sociological study kind of thing, attitudes concerning mass killing.
Yeah, I think that the most important parts of this analysis have to do with attitudes or sort of subconscious attitudes that are not necessarily obvious on the surface.
Of course, one of them is racism.
You know, it's something that is difficult to talk about.
But the fact is that the last three wars, which I discuss in my book, four wars actually, including Afghanistan, North Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq, all of which took place in Asia.
And we have certain attitudes.
European ancestry Americans have certain attitudes about Asians that make it easier, I think, to ignore civilian suffering.
And you could see this in a lot of cultural artifacts of the war, the movies and songs and so on that tended to sort of degrade Asians as human beings.
And then, of course, there's also a willingness on the part of the news media to let themselves be intimidated by the government when the government is displeased with their reporting.
I think that the Bush administration was very determined to keep bad news to a minimum during the Iraq war.
You know, you remember the big brouhaha over not allowing photographers, press photographers, into Dover Air Force Base where coffins of American soldiers were brought back from the Iraq war.
Well, you just take that times 10 in looking at how they would regard things like very high casualty numbers of Iraqis and other bad news that were coming out of the war.
And I think that the news media, the editors, would say, oh, no, no, no, we're not.
You know, we don't let any government intimidate us.
But it does have a chilling effect when you're getting a call from Karl Rove or Dick Cheney's office or something like that when you print something that they don't like.
So I think that that is also at work.
But the thing that I found most interesting in writing my book is that there's a kind of a psychological turning away from misery and from mayhem that is something we all do to some extent.
I mean, you think about yourself walking down a street and seeing somebody in a wheelchair begging.
And a lot of people, not everyone, but a lot of people will not respond to that beggar, may even get a little angry that that beggar is there sort of confronting them in a way.
And I think that it's a kind of a natural psychological response that is you just don't want to deal with the bad news that that person represents, the idea that somebody could be begging in America who's disabled.
Now, you take that on a larger scale with respect to a war.
The war began.
There was a rally around the flag effect.
About 70% approval of the war when it began.
And then a very rapid lack of support, growing dissent or a growing feeling that this was a mistake.
And what accounts for that?
Well, what accounts for it is that things were going badly.
A lot of people were being killed.
Remember, we were promised this was going to be a quick war.
Very few people were going to be hurt.
It was going to be over in a matter of weeks.
And we would be greeted with flowers and so on and so forth.
But when that didn't occur, it becomes psychologically becomes a much, much more difficult thing for us to deal with.
And people turn away.
They blame the victims.
They don't want to hear about it.
And I think the news media sort of does the same thing.
They're interested in the politics of it.
They're interested in policy.
They're interested in what Petraeus is doing or whether or not Saddam is going to be tried in a court and so on.
But when it comes to the Iraqi civilians who are taking the brunt of all this violence and were being displaced, 5 million people displaced, many, many widows, many, many schools disrupted, destroyed, health care system in shambles, and so on, they don't want to deal with it any more than we do, in effect.
And so the story goes wanting.
The story about civilian casualties simply doesn't have an audience, in part because we don't want to hear about it.
Yeah.
Well, yeah, I mean, that's true.
And of course, at the time, I don't know if they specifically attacked you.
I guess it must have been.
But they just said, oh, come on.
And this is the Democrats are trying to make us look bad before an election.
They said that in 04 and in 06 when the Lancet Johns Hopkins reports came out.
That's right.
And I think that there was good to being political.
I can say, with respect to the second one, that we'd actually begun.
I commissioned it a year before it came out.
Yeah, of course.
I mean, never mind.
Never even mind.
Obviously, that was hype.
The point is that worked, right?
They just changed the subject completely to what a Democrat you must be or whatever.
Yeah, I think that it does work to some extent.
It was labeled as being a politicized kind of thing.
And interestingly enough, the Wall Street Journal under Murdoch took the biggest shot of all, basically saying it was phony science and politicized science and so on and so forth.
And so this attempt to denigrate even the effort of finding out how many people have died makes it all the more easy for people to turn away.
Right, give them an out.
That number is phony.
And so it's a real uphill struggle, I must say.
I was very much involved in the publicity effort.
I didn't do this survey myself.
It was done by epidemiologists, including Les Roberts.
But the publicity effort in dealing with the public discussion and debate about this was very sobering.
I mean, it was about a two or three day story.
And then the counterattacks started.
And the counterattacks lasted for a very, very long time.
The right wing blog of fear and then this National Journal article that then was broadcast very widely by the right wing media.
So that was going on like a year and a half later.
And I think that it really does have a do.
It's partly political.
You know, they didn't want to cop to the idea that so many more people died under US occupation than died while Saddam Hussein was in power.
But it also has to do with this sort of blaming the victim, blaming the messenger, in this case, and not wanting to deal with it.
And this is true of Vietnam.
This is true of Korea.
I think to some extent it's true of Afghanistan, although mayhem is on a much lower scale.
But you remember, you probably learned in school that the Korean War, 1950, 1953, 3 million people died in three years in Korea.
Very bloody war.
It's often been called the Forgotten War.
Yeah, all anybody knows about it is MASH.
Yeah, MASH, right.
MASH and people who know politics have to remember the Truman controversy with General MacArthur.
But that's about it.
And they don't know, well, how many people died or who died and why they died.
And what were the consequences?
Did it have anything to do then with what happened in Vietnam and so on?
These things have a way of rolling out over many, many years, the consequences.
Right, that's back to the original point is that the myth of just a few tens of thousands died at the most makes it easier for the next one and the next one.
And I have a little anecdote along those lines.
Right after the first Johns Hopkins Lancet study came out in 2004, I saw an old friend who was for the Iraq War and said, it's going to turn out great, and they're going to be a good friend of ours for a long time, and it's going to be worth it and whatever.
And I said, look, man, already 100,000 people have died.
And he said, 100,000?
No, come on.
And I said, yeah, that's the thing.
It just came out.
They did this big study.
Go and look at it.
And he said, oh, well, I don't know.
Maybe I'm wrong.
His whole they're better off now than under Saddam Hussein thing immediately fell away when faced with the reality of the body count of the dead civilians so far.
I mean, I don't know if he changed his mind completely, but it was a seed planted and sprouted in one shot.
And so as long as the rest of people who were like him are still only hearing maybe 20,000 or 50,000 people died or something, they can justify that a lot easier, seems like.
So we've got to keep getting the truth out there.
It's not over yet.
Exactly.
Well, I think it's very important, as with anything in life, is you have to total up the costs and benefits of any particular action.
I mean, that's a very sort of crude way of talking about war.
But even if you were in favor of the war, getting rid of Saddam Hussein, was it really worth a million lives?
Was it worth five million refugees?
These are questions that we should be discussing in this society.
This is a very big deal.
I mean, among other things, we have this big budget and debt crisis in Washington now, supposedly.
How much money do we spend on these wars?
How is it affecting our domestic politics now?
I mean, all these things are.
And our legal system.
I mean, all kinds of things.
We have civil liberties issues.
And it just had tremendous impact here.
And it had a devastating impact on the catastrophe for Iraq.
And we simply don't want to come to terms with this, even though we're involved still there.
And we're involved in Afghanistan in an active war.
We're involved in Libya now in an active war.
Don't we want to learn from these experiences?
I mean, again, regardless whether you're for or against these actions, don't we want to learn from these experiences?
That's why I say in my book that the military should want to know, more than anybody else, how people are dying and why they're dying, how many people are dying.
They need to know this, because that's part of their business, right, if they're in the midst of a war.
So the fact that we ignore this so much, so completely, or nearly completely, is really puzzling to me.
But I think these psychological and other factors explains, to some extent, why we ignore them.
All right, well, I'd like to explore some of those in more depth.
But we're all out of time.
I want to thank you very much for your time.
I recommend everybody check out this great article at alternet.org, A Million Kill, or is it dead?
A Million Dead in Iraq.
And check out the book, The Deaths of Others, The Fate of Civilians in America's Wars, by John Tierman.
Thank you very much for your time.
Appreciate it.
Thank you very much.
Bye-bye.
