THE HIGH COST OF VENGEFUL WAR – by Daniel M. Smith 

As the sixth anniversary of 9/11 approaches, President George W. Bush’s media picture of Iraq grows increasingly unreal. In truth, Iraq is devolving into a series of Potemkin villages, quiet now, with military-age men receiving training, arms, and money from the United States in a “marriage of temporary interests.”

Every Iraqi knows that eventually U.S. and coalition troops will leave. That’s why 100,000 Iraqis a month continue to flee. They expect that once U.S. forces and their monetary handouts are gone, the old tribal loyalties and sectarianisms will reassert themselves. 

That’s the present and future reality. It’s the legacy from the 2001 destruction of the World Trade Center towers and one wing of the Pentagon when hijackers flew three civilian airliners into the structures and a fourth crashed in Pennsylvania when passengers tried to regain control. 

The death toll that 9/11 – (minus the 19 hijackers) – was 2,973. Ironically, in the subsequent retributive “war on terror” in Afghanistan and Iraq, undertaken to punish those responsible and their supporters, the number of U.S. military personnel killed passed that total on September 3, 2006, just days short of the fifth anniversary of the attack: 329 in Afghanistan, 2,645 in Iraq. 

One year later, U.S. losses in Operation Enduring Freedom (Afghanistan) are 438, including 81 in the first eight months of 2007. Projecting current trend lines, it is likely that at year’s end the count will easily surpass 100, making 2007 the bloodiest year of this war. As for the Afghan people, their losses over the last six years remain largely unrecorded. However, drawing on recent U.N. and confidential Afghan Interior Ministry reports, one source estimated 1,400 Afghan civilians were killed in war-related violence in the first 8 months of 2007.  

The very real possibility looms that the burden of blood and treasure lost will increase disproportionately for the United States over the next year. Key NATO allies in the Afghan war are becoming disenchanted by the growing losses in a conflict that has no horizon or hint of “success” against a resilient Taliban insurgency. The disenchantment is reflected in public opinion polls such as the late July/early August on-line poll of 5,075 adults in Britain, Canada, France, Germany and Italy. Between 49 percent and 69 percent in each country thought the war effort in Afghanistan a failure. 

In Iraq, the future is even grimmer. United States losses through August 31 stand at 3,741 while allied forces have suffered 297 fatalities. In August, at least 1,773 Iraqi civilians and 76 Iraqi security personnel were killed. Since January 2005, based on U.N. estimates and Iraqi government statistics where available, a minimum 76,180 Iraqis died in the warfare that has engulfed their country. (These fatalities are in addition to the estimated 655,000 “excess” (above expected mortality) deaths indirectly associated with the fighting – the “Lancet” studies.)  

With so much carnage, the question arises – many have voiced it already – whether the Bush administration has become so inured to war that it cannot envision functioning in the absence of armed conflict. Indeed, it seems as though the Bush White House is caught in a self-created, cosmic-level circular logic. No matter how much effort it exerts, the administration cannot break free of the political and military conditions it created in Iraq, nor regain enough sway over events to direct what transpires there. Like a spacecraft in a declining orbit, U.S. influence can only decay over the next 16 months as central authority continues to disintegrate – possibly even leading to de facto partition of the country into sectarian and ethnic enclaves. Even where neighborhoods or towns appear pacified today, it is more likely because they have been “cleansed” of minority populations. 

Reported “body counts” in the Bush wars exceed 82,300 men, women and children – plus civilian and combatant deaths in Afghanistan before 2007 and in Iraq before 2005 when such information was not collected and recorded. That amounts to 27 deaths in war for every person killed September 11, 2001. This certainly exceeds the “eye for an eye” prescription. 

And therein is the highest cost of all. For long ago, retribution, always morally suspect, morphed into revenge – which is flat out immoral whether done by individual soldiers or by the nation-state.