wars' civilian casualties:
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| Wed, 08-18-2004 - 7:58am |
"People don't want to hear bad news that they themselves have
caused," said
Shiels, 55.
http://www.thejournalnews.com/newsroom/080204/a0102casualties.html
By ERNIE GARCIA
THE JOURNAL NEWS
August 2, 2004
DOBBS FERRY — The concern over innocents dying in attacks on outlaw
regimes is as old as the Bible, in which God agreed with the Prophet
Abraham's petition to spare Sodom if 10 righteous men could be found
there. The 10 were not found.
And a study of the past 100 years of American warfare by a local
professor shows the United States is edging toward a more divine
standard — sparing innocents during recent military campaigns.
But Mercy College history professor Frederick Shiels, the study's
author, also argues that news coverage of current conflicts in Iraq
and Afghanistan illustrates Americans' indifference or aversion to
details about these deaths, reduced as they may be compared with
previous American wars.
"People don't want to hear bad news that they themselves have
caused," said Shiels, 55.
Shiels' most recent work, studying the number of Iraqi civilians
killed in the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, is part of a larger study
on American wars between the 1901 Philippine Insurrection and the
2001 invasion of Afghanistan against the Taliban and al-Qaida.
He estimates that 6,000 to 8,000 Iraqi civilians have been killed by
the U.S. military since March 2003, when the war began. In
Afghanistan, Shiels estimates, 3,000 civilians were accidentally
killed by American-led coalition forces.
Shiels' estimate is relatively conservative. Other sources put the
figures higher, including a June 24 Foreign Policy in Focus report
that estimated 9,300 to 11,400 civilians had been killed in Iraq
since the war began.
About 3,100 American civilians have been killed since the Sept. 11,
2001, attacks, with virtually all of them at the hands of criminal or
terrorist organizations.
Counting civilian deaths during warfare is an inexact endeavor,
Shiels said. For wars in the 20th century, he has relied on archival
sources, while his Iraq and Afghanistan counts consist of press
accounts, nongovernmental organizations' Web sites and U.S. military
reports.
Foreign civilian deaths, Shiels said, have not received the same
coverage by American press as they have by European or Arab media.
Shiels cited the difference in coverage of the Abu Ghraib prisoner-
abuse scandal relative to Iraqi civilian deaths as an example of
skewed coverage.
"The coverage of (Abu Ghraib) was tremendous because it had a lurid
component," he said. "But what about the conservative 6,000 to 8,000
people that have died because of the military acting to displace
Saddam Hussein? The reporting by comparison is fractional."
Shiels said the underreporting is partially driven by commercial
interests. "If you assume that the media are in some sense business
driven — they have to sell papers or competitive air time — then they
are going to want to report news that more directly affects the lives
of their audiences, and that's always going to be American soldiers
killed. American soldiers experiencing a lack of supplies or
hardships is always going to trump peasants or country people in
foreign places who are killed, especially if they are killed in what
some Americans think of as a greater cause."
Nick Mottern, 65, a Vietnam veteran and peace activist from
Peekskill, said, "The public does not understand the day-to-day
civilian toll. People imagine what's going on, but they don't feel
it."
The U.S. government has no estimate of civilian casualties in Iraq.
When asked via e-mail to comment on the estimates of civilian war
dead, Staff Sgt. Troy Hawkes with the U.S. Coalition Press
Information Center said, "We are deeply saddened when anyone is
killed. The fact that many of these deaths are a result of terrorist
attacks against innocent people is a further tragedy and it
emphasizes the need for a secure and stable environment in Iraq."
U.S. military deaths since the end of major combat operations in Iraq
in May 2003 now stand at 911, according to the Defense Department.
There are no official casualty counts for the Iraqi military, but the
site antiwar.com, a division of the Randolph Bourne Institute,
estimates the Iraqi military's casualties between 4,895 to 6,370.
Shiels began his civilian casualty studies in 2003 to create history-
course study materials and to address what he describes as
discrepancies in U.S. media and history books and the reality of
intentional or accidental harm inflicted on civilians by the
military.
In the proposal for his original study on the 20th century, Shiels
estimated that 6 million civilians have died as a direct result of
U.S. military actions since 1940. He does not suggest all those
deaths imply the same responsibility for the United States, but he
observed that discussion of the deaths "has been strangely lacking
outside of professional peace circles."
Taken in its entirety, from the Philippine Insurrection to today's
Iraq conflict, Shiels said his study presents a common thread for
those interested in U.S. history.
"We invaded the Philippines to liberate, pacify and to establish
order," Shiels said of the three-year war that he estimated to have
killed 4,200 U.S. soldiers and caused 200,000 civilian deaths. The
United States claimed the war liberated the archipelago from Spanish
colonial rule.
| Fri, 08-20-2004 - 3:49pm |
