On Prestige and Power and War Crimes

I wrote about this only a few weeks ago, but I still can't get my head around how this story played out in the press. (I could cite many more examples of this national noblesse oblige, such as revelations from the Downing Street Memo, on Abu Ghraib, on illegal wiretapping, on secret prisons, etc.)

From the Center for Public Integrity:

President George W. Bush and seven of his administration's top officials, including Vice President Dick Cheney, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, made at least 935 false statements in the two years following September 11, 2001, about the national security threat posed by Saddam Hussein's Iraq. Nearly five years after the U.S. invasion of Iraq, an exhaustive examination of the record shows that the statements were part of an orchestrated campaign that effectively galvanized public opinion and, in the process, led the nation to war under decidedly false pretenses....

In short, the Bush administration led the nation to war on the basis of erroneous information that it methodically propagated and that culminated in military action against Iraq on March 19, 2003.

I simply can't understand why this story hasn't gotten more traction. As a matter of sound evidence of governmental deception and war crimes, it couldn't be clearer. Yet, at the mageristerial press conferences and speeches by governmental personnel, we witness continuing deference, and acceptance of lies and spins, with the promise of cocktail parties later for the "in" crowd who never make waves. Is it really all about access to power?

Who has more prestige than the powerful? Where can we find more deception than in the highest echelons of the societal apparatus?

Prestige

1546, "practicing illusion or magic, deceptive," from L. præstigious "full of tricks," from præstigiæ "juggler's tricks," probably altered by dissimilation from præstringere "to blind, blindfold, dazzle," from præ- "before" + stringere "to tie or bind" (see strain (v.)). Prestige is from 1656, from Fr. prestige "an illusion" (16c.). These words were derogatory until 19c.; prestige in the sense of "dazzling influence" was first applied 1815, to Napoleon. Prestigious with this sense is attested from 1913

Power

Privilege is prestige, and prestige, in its fundamental nature as in the etymology of the word, means deception and enchantment. Again the line of development is continuous from the magician-leader of the simpler societies to the priest-king or god-king of the first civilization, as indeed Frazer showed fifty years ago.

Power was originally sacred, and it remains so in the modern world. Again we must not be misled by the flat antimony of the sacred and the secular, and interpret as "secularization" what is only a metamorphosis of the sacred. If there is a class which has nothing to lose but its chains, the chains that bind it are self-imposed, sacred obligations which appear as objective realities with all the force of a neurotic delusion. (Life Against Death, Norman O. Brown, Vintage Books, 1959, p. 252)

What else but neurotic delusion or mass denial could account for the fact that U.S. citizens have failed to react to the fact that its government has in the past five years killed over one million people? As Reuters reports:

LONDON (Reuters) - More than one million Iraqis have died as a result of the conflict in their country since the U.S.-led invasion in 2003, according to research conducted by one of Britain's leading polling groups.

The survey, conducted by Opinion Research Business (ORB) with 2,414 adults in face-to-face interviews, found that 20 percent of people had had at least one death in their household as a result of the conflict, rather than natural causes....

The margin of error in the survey, conducted in August and September 2007, was 1.7 percent, giving a range of deaths of 946,258 to 1.12 million.

The Reuters story notes the now long-simmering controversy over the Iraq death toll. The OMB poll results are themselves a reduction from a study OMB initially reported last September that found 1.2 million Iraqis had died as the result of the U.S. invasion of Iraq. A Lancet study in 2004 found 100,000 had died as a result of the initial U.S. invasion. A second study in 2006 reported "654,965 excess deaths related to the war, or 2.5% of the population."

The website Iraq Body Count reports between 80,000 and 90,000 civilian deaths due to the war to date. But then IBC uses a "media-centered" approach to body counting:

The project uses reports from English-language news media (including Arabic media translated into English) to compile a running total. In its "Quick-FAQ" the IBC states: "It is likely that many if not most civilian casualties will go unreported by the media. That is the sad nature of war."

The statistical approach of the ORB is said to have the backing of many statisticians and epidemiologists, who use many of the same techniques in other studies of populations. Indeed, the U.S. Census uses household sampling methodologies, although not without its own concurrent controversies. (See this excellent article at Science News for a relevant discussion of statistical sampling issues.)

To make matters worse, counting Iraqi bodies has become even more difficult since "the surge," i.e., the escalation of the war.

...as the United Nations Assistance Mission in Iraq discovered early last year, verifying the numbers independently is impossible because, since the U.S. escalation nicknamed the "surge" began one year ago, the Iraqi government has refused to share its raw mortality data with UNAMI [United Nations Assistance Mission for Iraq] or other outside sources. Many human rights advocates, including UN Human Rights Officer Ivana Vucco, have said this step was taken under pressure from the United States to conceal the real level of violence.

No matter how you want to look at it, the U.S. government is responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people. And not the government only as a whole, but specific people in the government, individuals who are as directly responsible as the Nuremburg defendents were for the crimes of Hitler's regime. But you wouldn't know it if you watched the mass media spectacle that is modern America.

The famous playwright Arthur Miller is reported to have said that an era only comes to an end when its basic illusions are exhausted. The era of U.S. imperial policy and war hubris is not over. The illusions of much of the population in the goodness and right of the government, and the elite that staffs the top layers of government, remain alive, and seemingly oblivious to change. Yet underneath it all, the worm of change and transformation silently gnaws, and the presitigious apparatus that girds the temples and monuments of power awaits its Ozymandian moment.

On Wars and Casualities: "Numbers Sanctify"

A new study on Iraqi casualites due to the U.S. invasion have engendered some controversy, and the newspapers duly report the figures. Is it 30,000? 150,000? 600,000?

In these crazy, deadly times, how appropriate to give the final word to a celluloid figure, whose own final words were recorded over sixty years ago now:

Wars, conflict, it's all business. One murder makes a villain. Millions a hero. Numbers sanctify. (Monsieur Verdoux)

"Our impenetrable national narcissism"

The following quote is from Chris Floyd's blog, Empire Burqlesque, which I recently added to my blogroll. The quote in the title above, though, is from an article by Arthur Silber.

The latter is quoted by Floyd in an article that begins by mentioning the civil rights march in support of the Jena 6. Fifty years ago, the civil rights movement cut through the Cold War demagogy of the post-WWII anti-communist consensus, which swaddled the nation with lies and militarism, until the country was almost suffocated. But now, as Floyd points out, even a large civil rights protest is lost among the sewer detritus that is the current political situation in the United States.

The recent news that the Iraq War death count has reached something like a million human beings rippled through American society like a feather dropped into an empty ocean. -- Have we all become the "good Germans" now?

Likewise, last week's peaceful rally against Jim Crow justice in Jena, Louisiana, was indeed heartening; but as we have seen, not even years of the civil rights movement at its strongest, widest and deepest impact was able to break the power of the conglomeration: the empire of bases kept growing, the militarization of the economy and society accelerated, millions of people were massacred in Indochina.... The half-century of hope that dawned on a Montgomery bus ended with the illegal installation of George W. Bush and his bloodthirsty clique in the White House.

In any case, the history of the past six years has shown that the American people, as a whole, cannot be stirred even by the most brazen outrages. Not by the wholesale assault on their liberties; not by the rot of their roads, bridges, towns and cities; not by the massive perversion of their electoral system; not by the deaths of their sons and daughters, their friends and neighbors, in a war of aggression they were tricked into by deliberate lies; not by their government's embrace of torture, concentration camps, secret prisons, and death squads; not even by the murder – in their own name – of more than one million Iraqis. Not even this genocidal fury – powerfully evoked here by Arthur Silber and here by Lew Rockwell – has shaken them from the half-sleep of what Silber calls "our impenetrable national narcissism."

The only problem with the narcissism charge is the old one of which came first, the chicken or the egg? Even back in 1979, Christopher Lasch noted the American retreat "to purely personal preoccupations", which included "a retreat from politics and a repudiation of the recent past". (The Culture of Narcissism, W. W Norton & Co., p. 4-5). The "past" in question was the Sixties and Seventies, years of social and political turmoil dominated by the Vietnam War, the fight for African-American civil rights, and the political revelations, post-Vietnam, of the crimes of the American executive branch and its agencies in the Pentagon and at the CIA.

I am assured by some of the politically quiescent that I know that their withdrawal is based upon fear of repression, and upon a sense of politically futility, a futility only accentuated by the cowardice of the ostensible opposition party, the Democrats.

In psychology, there used to be quite a row over what mattered more in behavior, the stimulus or the response. That artificial dichotomy was shattered in a famous essay by American pragmatist John Dewey.

What was true of static, overly idealized views a hundred years ago of psycholgical and physiological functioning in an organism is true of simplistic political analyses today. And here, I am not arguing against either Floyd or Silber, but with the mainstream punditry of our large circulation press, the networks and cable news channels, of the respectable magazines, etc.

The "dialecticians" among Marxist thinkers had deconstructed it all long ago: power and the people ruled by power exist in an unstable relationship to each other. It may only seem stable when viewed up close, by the measuring stick of a life span, or of two, or even three life spans -- rarely more than that.

Viewed with any historical perspective, we can see that a lulled population and its political somnolence can only last so long. That's why the creeps at NSA work night and day to record everything we say or write. They even want to know what we think (and would if they could).

There is still time for the American people to take their rightful place on the stage of history. And their role will be to expose and bring down one of the most corrupt and criminal organizations to ever find their way to control of an ostensibly democratic state.

Iraq War Death Count

There has been a long controversy over the Lancet study, "Mortality After the 2003 Invasion of Iraq", which used a cross-sectional cluster sample survey in its finding that over 600,000 Iraqis had suffered violent deaths attributable to the U.S. war in that country. The most common death, according to the study authors, was by gunfire.

Now, Stephen Soldz, at his blog, Psyche, Science, and Society, has published a report from BBC News reporting that the British Ministry of Defense found the study's methodology to be "robust", and "tried and tested".

The British government was advised against publicly criticising a report estimating that 655,000 Iraqis had died due to the war, the BBC has learnt.

Iraqi Health Ministry figures put the toll at less than 10% of the total in the survey, published in the Lancet. But the Ministry of Defence’s chief scientific adviser said the survey’s methods were “close to best practice” and the study design was “robust”.
Another expert agreed the method was “tried and tested”....

The Lancet medical journal published its peer-reviewed survey last October. It was conducted by the John Hopkins School of Public Health and compared mortality rates before and
after the invasion by surveying 47 randomly chosen areas across 16 provinces in Iraq.

The researchers spoke to nearly 1,850 families, comprising more than 12,800 people. In nearly 92% of cases family members produced death certificates to support their answers. The survey estimated that 601,000 deaths were the result of violence, mostly gunfire.
Shortly after the publication of the survey in October last year Tony Blair’s official spokesperson said the Lancet’s figure was not anywhere near accurate.

He said the survey had used an extrapolation technique, from a relatively small sample from an area of Iraq that was not representative of the country as a whole. President Bush said: “I don’t consider it a credible report.”

But a memo by the MoD’s Chief Scientific Adviser, Sir Roy Anderson, on 13 October, states: “The study design is robust and employs methods that are regarded as close to “best practice” in this area, given the difficulties of data collection and verification in the present circumstances in Iraq.”

There has been a long controversy over the Lancet study, Stephen Soldz has been the most inclusive and incisive reporter on this subject on the Internet. It would be worthwhile to check his archive for the history of this controversy as it has unfolded.

Meanwhile, the U.S. stands guilty of having caused the deaths of over half a million people, thanks to the criminal machinations of the White House.

When will the war criminals be brought to justice? That this question sounds merely quixotic demonstrates how far the U.S. society has fallen in regards to moral integrity, progressive leadership, and just plain honesty.