The Carnage in Iraq—Past, Present, and Future By Robert Higgs

September 03, 2007

The headline of an August 22, 2007, article in the New York Times reads, “Citing Vietnam, Bush Warns of Carnage if U.S. Leaves Iraq.” Readers with live brain cells must be stunned by such a warning. What, exactly, does President Bush imagine is happening every day in Iraq now? Does he envision scenes of social tranquility and cooperative harmony amid the peaceful palms of Mesopotamia? And what, one wonders, does he suppose was going on earlier in Vietnam, as the U.S. forces extended their unwelcome stay year after grisly year? At times, observing the president and listening to his speeches, one simply doesn’t know what to make of him. Is he actually as detached from reality as he appears to be? And do his handlers really believe that at this late date, the American people will take seriously the rhetoric his speech writers persist in putting into his mouth?

No one knows precisely how many Iraqis have perished from violence since the U.S. forces unleashed “shock and awe” on them in March 2003 as a prelude to “liberating” them and shoving the blessings of “democracy” down their throats. Estimates vary from several scores of thousands to several hundreds of thousands. In any event, the number of deaths is enormous, especially in relation to the country’s population of approximately 25 million (as assessed in recent years).

If we suppose, for example, that 100,000 Iraqis have died as a direct or indirect result of the present war, that number is equivalent to 1,200,000 deaths in the United States, whose population has been in the neighborhood of 300 million in recent years. Does anyone doubt that Americans would consider 1,200,000 war-related deaths in four and a half years to constitute “carnage”? Whatever name one gives it, the number equals more than 400 times the number who died as a result of the infamous 9/11 attacks, and plenty of Americans were outraged by that relatively tiny number of fatalities. How might they have felt if they had suffered as a result of invasion and occupation the equivalent of the 9/11 death toll every fourth day since March 20, 2003? (The deadliest war in U.S. history, the War Between the States, caused approximately 620,000 deaths, most of them of soldiers, in four years.)

Sad to say, the Iraqi death toll may have been much greater than the one assumed in the preceding illustrations, more than six times greater, according to one respectable estimate. In addition to this appalling mortality, the war has caused countless wounds, injuries, illnesses, and an unspeakable amount of human misery and heartbreak. The great majority of those who have died or sustained injuries have been noncombatants, people who just happened to be within the blast radius of bombs, rockets, and shells or in the path of one or more of the billions (yes, billions) of bullets U.S. forces have fired and the lesser—but still considerable—number the feuding Iraqi factions have fired. The descriptions and accounts of parents whose children have been killed or terribly wounded, and children whose parents have been killed, are agonizing to read. Yet such events are utterly normal in Iraq today: they occurred yesterday; they are occurring today; and they will occur tomorrow.

So, to return to George W. Bush, what does he suppose will happen if U.S. forces do not leave Iraq? Surely the answer must be: carnage on a vast scale, carnage with no end in sight. Regardless of how deeply the president may immerse himself in wishful thinking, no other outcome may reasonably be expected.

Bush reminded the listeners of his “carnage warning” speech at the Veterans of Foreign Wars convention in Kansas City that when U.S. forces pulled out of Vietnam, “the price of America’s withdrawal was paid by millions of innocent citizens.” So it was. Yet, once the U.S. forces had done what they had done prior to 1973, what would have happened had they remained in Vietnam, continuing to carry on their war business as usual? The only reasonable answer is: more of the same, on a vast scale—carnage that would have continued as long as U.S. forces remained in the country.

In Iraq, as in Vietnam earlier, we must expect that if U.S. forces were to leave, more carnage would occur. It is conceivable that the Iraqis would devise a way to settle their differences without enormous violence, but the odds now seem greatly against their doing so. Ultimately, of course, they would find a way; no society can persist forever in a state of civil war on the scale that now prevails in Iraq. Yet many more people are almost certain to die and to suffer wounds and the destruction of property before a peaceful resolution is effected. And that resolution itself may be dreadful in other regards. The United States, however, cannot prevent this distressing outcome. Indeed, its invasion and occupation have created conditions that make such an outcome virtually unavoidable. In short, the U.S. adventure in Iraq cannot have a happy ending. Just because the president unleashed the demons now raging across Iraq does not mean that he or anyone else can chain them now.

Unless the U.S. forces leave, however, their containment will never really get started, because aside from a small group of collaborators and puppet officials, all Iraqis agree on the desirability of getting U.S. and other foreign forces out of the country. When, after World War I, Great Britain formed Iraq from three Ottoman provinces and governed it as a League of Nations mandate, the Iraqis resisted the overlord’s rule to a greater or lesser degree until the Brits in 1932 granted them independence (with Britain retaining military bases and transit rights), leaving behind a political situation congenial only to dictatorship and repression. When the United States leaves Iraq, the political situation will be even uglier, probably for a very long time. No one has a magic sword to slay the dragons of ethnic, tribal, religious, and ideological hatred and conflict that suffuse Iraqi society or a magic potion to suppress the Iraqi appetite for political violence. Moreover, at this point a great many Iraqis have scores to settle with one another. For the neocon ideologues to have imagined that the U.S. armed forces could waltz into Iraq and establish a viable liberal democracy, initiating a cascade of similar political transformations across the Middle East, ranks among the greatest delusions of modern history.

It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the president’s mind cannot accommodate much logic or empirical evidence. And he has admitted, as if an admission were necessary, that he does not “do nuance.” He and his speech writers will go to any lengths, however, to create the impression that keeping U.S. forces in Iraq will be good for the Iraqi people, not simply for Halliburton, Blackwater, Alliant Techsystems (the military cartridge manufacturer), and the rest of the military-industrial complex. Bush’s term in office is not scheduled to end until January 20, 2009—an interval that now feels like an eternity—and despite everything that suggests the wisdom and humanity of getting U.S. forces out of Iraq as soon as possible, he appears hellbent on staying the homicidal course, without so much as a rhetorical retreat from his self-righteous, Manichean conception of the complex conflicts ravaging that wretched land. Why should any humane person approve of staying this ill-fated course? Because, the president declares, a U.S. departure might result in carnage.

Charles V. Peña is Senior Fellow at the Independent Institute as well as a senior fellow with the Coalition for a Realistic Foreign Policy, senior fellow with the George Washington University Homeland Security Policy Institute, and an adviser on the Straus Military Reform Project.

William Ratliff is Adjunct Fellow at the Independent Institute, Research Fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution, and a frequent writer on Chinese and Cuban foreign policies.

Ivan Eland is Director of the Center on Peace & Liberty at The Independent Institute and Assistant Editor of The Independent Review. Dr. Eland is a graduate of Iowa State University and received an M.B.A. in applied economics and Ph.D. in national security policy from George Washington University. He has been Director of Defense Policy Studies at the Cato Institute, Principal Defense Analyst at the Congressional Budget Office, Evaluator-in-Charge (national security and intelligence) for the U.S. General Accounting Office, and Investigator for the House Foreign Affairs Committee. Full Biography and Recent Publications

Jonathan J. Bean is Research Fellow at the Independent Institute, Professor of History at Southern Illinois University, and editor of the forthcoming book, Race and Liberty: The Classical Liberal Tradition of Civil Rights.

Anthony Gregory is a Research Analyst at The Independent Institute. He earned his bachelor's degree in American history from the University of California at Berkeley and gave the undergraduate history commencement speech in 2003. In addition to his work with the Independent Institute, he regularly writes for numerous news and commentary web sites, including LewRockwell.com, Future of Freedom Foundation, and the Rational Review.
Full Biography and Recent Publications

Dominick T. Armentano is professor emeritus in economics at the University of Hartford (Connecticut) and a research fellow at The Independent Institute in Oakland, Calif. He is author of Antitrust & Monopoly (Independent Institute, 1998).

Alvaro Vargas Llosa is director of The Center on Global Prosperity at The Independent Institute. He is a native of Peru and received his B.S.C. in international history from the London School of Economics. He is widely published and has lectured on world economic and political issues including at the Mont Pelerin Society, Naumann Foundation (Germany), FAES Foundation (Spain), Brazilian Institute of Business Studies, Fundación Libertad (Argentina), CEDICE Foundation (Venezuela), Florida International University, and the Ecuadorian Chamber of Commerce. He is the author of the Independent Institute books The Che Guevara Myth and Liberty for Latin America. Full biography and recent publications.

Pierre Lemieux is an economist and co-director of the Economics and Liberty Research Group at the Université du Québec en Outaouais and a Research Fellow at The Independent Institute in Oakland, California.

Alexander Tabarrok is research director at The Independent Institute, associate professor of economics at George Mason University, editor of the Independent Institute books, Entrepreneurial Economics, The Voluntary City (with D. Beito and P. Gordon), and Changing the Guard: Private Prisons and the Control of Crime.

Robert Higgs is Senior Fellow in Political Economy at The Independent Institute, author of Against Leviathan and Crisis and Leviathan, and editor of the scholarly quarterly journal, The Independent Review. Click here for a bio on Dr. Higgs, the noted economist and historian.

William Marina is Research Fellow at the Independent Institute in Oakland, Calif., and Professor Emeritus of History at Florida Atlantic University.

David T. Beito is a Research Fellow at The Independent Institute, Associate Professor of History at the University of Alabama, and co-editor of the book, The Voluntary City: Choice, Community and Civil Society.

William Marina and David T. Beito belong to "Liberty and Power," a group blog at the History News Network.

For further articles and studies, see the Center on Peace & Liberty and OnPower.org.

Nicolas Heidorn is a public policy intern at The Independent Institute in Oakland, California.

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