Imperial Math: Counting the Dead

By Thomas S. Harrington, CounterPunch

26 March 16

n Tuesday, immediately following the bloody attacks in Brussels, Michael Morrell, the former number-two at the CIA, proclaimed that ISIS is “winning” its ongoing confrontation with the US and the countries of Europe. “They’re winning, and we’re going to have to find additional approaches to try to undermine them.”

I am no expert on the metrics employed by military strategists to gauge success in armed conflicts. My guess, however, is that it all boils down to some combination of a) the ability to kill the highest possible number of the enemy’s combatants and their presumed supporters and b) the ability to inflict the greatest amount of damage and disruption on the social and physical infrastructure of the societies that the designated enemies are from, or are believed to identify with most strongly.

So let’s see how the scorecard between “us” and the societies where “our enemies” live and/or find their sense of cultural direction, plays out. The figures are culled from various sources readily available on the Internet.

Over the last 15 years Islamic militants have carried out five major coordinated attacks on US and western European targets (New York and Washington 2001, Madrid 2004, London 2005, Paris 2015 and Brussels 2016) killing some 3402 people. If we widen the scope of the inquiry to include Israelis under the umbrella of US-Western European culture and civilization (as they so often remind us should be the case) there are some 465 people more people for a total of 3867. If we widen the net further to include attacks that occurred in Russia along with all of the less massive attacks on US and European soil (a total of 693, mainly Russians), the number rises to 4560.

When it comes to the matter of destroyed infrastructure and enduring disruptions of daily life in the US and Western Europe, there’s really nothing to report. While the attacks have been psychologically terrifying, and a source of unending pain and grief for the families and loved ones of those whose lives were cruelly extinguished, the attacks have done virtually nothing to alter our ability to live and work as we did before.

It is true we are now constantly spied on by our own government and subject to ritualized rape at airports, but that’s it.

Those of us who had food, fuel, shelter, schools and electricity before the attacks, generally still have all those things now. And very few, if any, people in Europe or the US have been driven out of their homes because of these armed attacks on our societies.

Let’s look now at the countries whose Islamic “cultures of hate”, we are constantly told, generate an unending supply of people willing to kill us for no apparent reason.

How have they done in regard to the attacks carried out on them the US and its allies?

According to Brown University’s Costs of War Study 92,00 Afghans have been killed since the US in invasion of that country in 2001 and 165,00 Iraqis killed as a result of war in that country since the US invasion of it in 2003. In Pakistan, they estimate 57,000 Pakistanis have been killed since the US began its covert war on that country in 2004-2005. And these are, by the authors’ own reckoning, conservative estimates.

In Libya, which was gratuitously destroyed by the US and the Europeans at the urging of US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, good statistics are hard to come by. But it appears that some 3,000 people were killed as a direct result of the Allied bombing campaign in 2011, and that several times number have died as a result of the massive sectarian unleashed by the conflict.

How about Syria? There, a Civil War was nearing its conclusion in 2013 with a quite probable Assad victory when, US and its allies (Israel, Turkey and Saudi Arabia) decided to intervene—as Sidney Blumenthal’s recently uncovered emails to Hillary Clinton confirm—in the hope of engineering a bloody and protracted standoff, the long-term goal of which was to insure that Syria not be able to act serve as a regional counterweight to Israel or Turkey for at least the next generation.

According to the UN, over 250,000 have now died in the war, and almost 75% of those deaths have occurred since the US and its allies got more heavily involved in the conflict in late 2013.

In the same 15 year period since 2001, the US’ most important strategic “friend”, Israel, has carried out three assaults (2006, 2008-09 and 2014) on the Palestinian enclave of Gaza, killing a total of some 4000 Palestinians. Total Israeli deaths from those assaults, which our corrupt and prostituted media insist on referring to as “wars”, are 95.

In 2006, Israel also assaulted its neighbor to the north, Lebanon, a country whose lower quarter it had already subjected to military occupation from 1982 to 2000. The result of this attack were 1200 Lebanese dead. The Israeli losses (remember, as was the case with most of the Israelis lost in the Gaza assaults these were troops aggressively invading a sovereign country) were 165.

Over the last few years, Saudi Arabia, the medieval dictatorship that arouses nothing but warm ejaculations of fraternal love in Washington and in European chanceries has carried out a) a bloody assault on Bahrain, which killed 90 and rooted out whatever pro-democratic forces the country might have had and b) a brutal air war with US-made equipment and logistical guidance in Yemen against the Houthis, attacks which resulted in the death of 2800 civilians in 2015 alone.

Then there is the US-backed coup Government of general Al-Sisi in Egypt which, according to Human Rights Watch, carried out the “premeditated” massacre of 817 peaceful protesters on at Rabaa Square in Cairo on August 14th , 2013

There’s also also the ongoing US-led drone and special forces war on Somalia where at the very least 250 Somalis have perished at the hands of these forces.

And then there the big one that absolutely no one talk about, but that is key to truly understanding the current tensions in Francophone Europe: Algeria.

True, most of deaths there occurred before 2001, and are thus, strictly speaking, outside the parameters that have governed our exposition to this point.

But the fact that the government perpetrators of the majority of these deaths have never been brought to justice, and indeed have officially been shielded from any prosecution, means that the wounds generated by this conflict are still very much with us, especially in France, the north African country’s former colonial master, where very large numbers of Algerians and their French-born children live and work

What happened there?

In 1991, Islamists in in that country were on their way to an apparent electoral victory in the coming elections when the US and French-backed government staged a coup. Over the next 15 years it brutally hunted down anyone and anything connected with the Islamist politics. Once the conflict got under way, there were, of course atrocities that went in the other direction as well. But let there be no doubt, the war, which generated some 200.000 deaths had its origin in the fact that a social and governmental elite backed by Western powers did not want to allow Algerian democracy to run its course.

How are things washing out for “our enemies” in terms of the second metric for war “success” mentioned above: the destruction of physical infrastructure and the widespread disruption of daily life for the majority of the population?

Well, Iraq, Libya Gaza, Somalia, Pakistan and Syria are now widely viewed as completely failed polities where the daily fight to survive requires almost every ounce of energy that citizens there possess. With the possible exception of its capital city, the same can be said of Afghanistan. While things are perhaps more tolerable there on the level of day- to-day rhythms, Egypt and Algeria and Lebanon are now veritable nests of fear and loathing where people know a few Ill-chosen words can earn you a full lifetime or a or a full deathtime of trouble.

But Michael Morrell, who has all these facts and much, much more information at his disposal, says “we” are losing the fight against “them”?

Could it be that Morrell, an economist by training, is that bad at numbers?

No, it’s just that he’s a practitioner of a new and rapidly expanding scientific discipline, “Imperial Math” which, by injecting heaping doses of racism and systematic dehumanization into its calculations and equations, consistently concludes that a four digit numbers like 4560 are always greater that ever-rising six and seven digit figures.

Highlighting Western Victims While Ignoring Victims of Western Violence

By Glenn Greenwald, The Intercept

26 March 16

merican cable news has broadcast non-stop coverage of the horrific attack in Brussels. Viewers repeatedly heard from witnesses and from the wounded. Video was shown in a loop of the terror and panic when the bombs exploded. Networks dispatched their TV stars to Brussels, where they remain. NPR profiled the lives of several of the airport victims. CNN showed a moving interview with a wounded, bandage-wrapped Mormon American teenager speaking from his Belgium hospital bed.

All of that is how it should be: That’s news. And it’s important to understand on a visceral level the human cost from this type of violence. But that’s also the same reason it’s so unjustifiable, and so propagandistic, that this type of coverage is accorded only to Western victims of violence, but almost never to the non-Western victims of the West’s own violence.

A little more than a week ago, as Mohammed Ali Kalfood reported in The Intercept, “Fighter jets from a Saudi-led [U.S. and U.K.-supported] coalition bombed a market in Mastaba, in Yemen’s northern province of Hajjah. The latest count indicates that about 120 people were killed, including more than 20 children, and 80 were wounded in the strikes.” Kalfood interviewed 21-year-old Yemeni Khaled Hassan Mohammadi, who said, “We saw airstrikes on a market last Ramadan, not far from here, but this attack was the deadliest.” Over the past several years, the U.S. has launched hideous civilian-slaughtering strikes in Yemen, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Syria, Somalia, Libya, and Iraq. Last July, The Intercept published a photo essay by Alex Potter of Yemeni victims of one of 2015’s deadliest Saudi-led, U.S.- and U.K.-armed strikes.

You’ll almost never hear any of those victims’ names on CNN, NPR, or most other large U.S. media outlets. No famous American TV correspondents will be sent to the places where those people have their lives ended by the bombs of the U.S. and its allies. At most, you’ll hear small, clinical news stories briefly and coldly describing what happened — usually accompanied by a justifying claim from U.S. officials, uncritically conveyed, about why the bombing was noble — but, even in those rare cases where such attacks are covered at all, everything will be avoided that would cause you to have any visceral or emotional connection to the victims. You’ll never know anything about them — not even their names, let alone hear about their extinguished life aspirations or hear from their grieving survivors — and will therefore have no ability to feel anything for them. As a result, their existence will barely register.

That’s by design. It’s because U.S. media outlets love to dramatize and endlessly highlight Western victims of violence, while rendering almost completely invisible the victims of their own side’s violence.

Perhaps you think there are good — or at least understandable — reasons to explain this discrepancy in coverage. Maybe you believe humans naturally pay more attention to, and empathize more with, the suffering of those they regard as more similar to them. Or you may want to argue that victims in cities commonly visited by American elites (Paris, Brussels, London, Madrid) are somehow more newsworthy than those in places rarely visited (Mastaba, in Yemen’s northern province of Hajjah). Or perhaps you’re sympathetic to the claim that it’s easier for CNN or NBC News to send on-air correspondents to glittery Western European capitals than to Waziristan or Kunduz. Undoubtedly, many believe that the West’s violence is morally superior because it only kills civilians by accident and not on purpose.

But regardless of the rationale for this media discrepancy, the distortive impact is the same: By endlessly focusing on and dramatizing Western victims of violence while ignoring the victims of the West’s own violence, the impression is continually bolstered that only They, but not We, engage in violence that kills innocent people. We are always the victims and never the perpetrators (and thus Good and Blameless); They are only the perpetrators and never the victims (and thus Villainous and Culpable). In April 2003, Ashleigh Banfield, then a rising war-correspondent star at MSNBC, returned from Iraq, gave a speech critiquing the one-sided, embedded U.S. media coverage of the war, and was shortly thereafter demoted and then fired. This is part of what she said:

That said, what didn’t you see? You didn’t see where those bullets landed. You didn’t see what happened when the mortar landed. A puff of smoke is not what a mortar looks like when it explodes, believe me. There are horrors that were completely left out of this war. … It was a glorious, wonderful picture that had a lot of people watching and a lot of advertisers excited about cable news. But it wasn’t journalism, because I’m not so sure that we in America are hesitant to do this again, to fight another war, because it looked like a glorious and courageous and so successful, terrific endeavor, and we got rid of horrible leader: We got rid of a dictator, we got rid of a monster, but we didn’t see what it took to do that. …

I think there were a lot of dissenting voices before this war about the horrors of war, but I’m very concerned about this three-week TV show and how it may have changed people’s opinions. It was very sanitized. … War is ugly and it’s dangerous, and in this world, the way we are discussed on the Arab street, it feeds and fuels their hatred and their desire to kill themselves to take out Americans.

In other words, the death, carnage, and destruction the U.S. invasion was causing was generating huge amounts of anti-American hatred and a desire to bring violence to Americans, even if meant sacrificing lives to accomplish that. But the U.S. media never showed any of that, so Americans had no idea it existed, and were thus incapable of understanding why people were eager to do violence to Americans. They therefore assumed that it must be because they are primitive or inherently hateful or driven by some inscrutable religious fervor.

That’s because the U.S. media, by showing only one side of the conflict, by presenting only the nationalistic viewpoint, propagandized — deceived — American viewers by making them more ignorant rather than more enlightened. As a result, when the trains of London and Madrid were attacked in 2004 and 2005 as retaliation for those countries’ participation in the invasion of Iraq, that causal connection (which even British intelligence acknowledged) was virtually never discussed because Western media outlets ensured it was unknown. The same was true of attempted attacks on the U.S.: in Times Square, the New York City subway system, an airliner over Detroit, all motivated by rage over Western violence. In the absence of any media discussion of those victims and motives, these attacks were was simply denounced as senseless, indiscriminate slaughter without any cause, and people were thus deprived of the ability to understand why they happened.

That’s exactly what’s happening still. Because I was traveling in the U.S. this week, I was subjected to literally dozens of hours of cable and network news coverage of the Brussels attacks. The most minute angles of the attack were dissected. But there was not one moment devoted to the question of why Belgium — and the U.S., France, and Russia before it — were targeted by ISIS (as opposed to a whole slew of non-Muslim, democratic countries around the world that ISIS doesn’t target), even though ISIS explicitly stated the reason and it is, in any event, self-evident: because those countries have been bombing ISIS in Syria and Iraq and these bombings were intended as retaliation and vengeance. Nor was there any discussion of why ISIS seems to have little trouble attracting support among some in Western countries: As even a Rumsfeld-commissioned study found in 2004, it is in large part because of widespread anger among Muslims over ongoing Western violence and interference in that part of the world.

The point, as always, isn’t justification: It is always morally unjustified to deliberately target civilians with violence (see the update here on that point). Nor does it prove that the bombing of ISIS in Iraq and Syria is unjustified or should cease. The point, instead, is that the war framework in which much of this violence takes place — one side that declares itself at war and uses violence as part of that war is inevitably attacked by the other side that it targets — is completely suppressed by one-sided media coverage that prefers a self-flattering, tribalistic cartoon narrative.

The ultimate media taboo is self-examination: the question of whether there are actions we take that exacerbate the problem we say we are trying to resolve. Such a process would not dilute the evil of ISIS’s civilian-targeting violence, but it would enable a more honest and complete understanding of the role Western governments’ policies play and the inevitable costs they entail. Perhaps those costs are worth enduring, but that question can only be rationally answered if the costs are openly discussed.

But whatever else is true, if we are constantly bombarded with images and stories and dramatic narratives highlighting our own side’s victims, while the victims of our side’s violence are rendered invisible, it’s only natural that large numbers of us will conclude that only They, but not We, are committing civilian-killing violence. That’s a really pleasing thing to believe, no matter how false it is. Having media outlets perpetrate self-pleasing and tribal-affirming — but utterly false — narratives is the very definition of propaganda. And that’s what largely drives Western media coverage of these terrorist attacks every time they occur in the West.