Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, meeting with troops in Qatar, 28 April 2003:

And there have not been large numbers of civilian casualties because the coalition took such great care to protect the lives of innocent civilians as well as holy sites. … When the dust is settled in Iraq, military historians will study this war. They’ll examine the unprecedented combination of power, precision, speed, flexibility and, I would add also, compassion that was employed.

General Tommy Franks, Bagram Air Force Base, 19 March 2002:

I don’t believe you have heard me or anyone else in our leadership talk about the presence of 1,000 bodies out there, or in fact how many have been recovered. You know we don’t do body counts.

Donald Rumsfeld, interview on FOX News Sunday, 9 November 2003:

Well, we don’t do body counts on other people ….

Gilbert Burnham, Shannon Doocy, Elizabeth Dzeng, Riyadh Lafta, and Les Roberts (principal authors): The Human Cost of the War in Iraq: A Mortality Study, 2002–2006:

A new household survey of Iraq has found that approximately 600,000 people have been killed in the violence of the war that began with the U.S. invasion in March 2003.

The survey was conducted by an American and Iraqi team of public health researchers. Data were collected by Iraqi medical doctors with analysis conducted by faculty of the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health. The results will be published in the British medical journal, The Lancet.

The survey is the only population-based assessment of fatalities in Iraq during the war. The method, a survey of more than 1800 households randomly selected in clusters that represent Iraq's population, is a standard tool of epidemiology and is used by the U.S. Government and many other agencies.

The survey also reflects growing sectarian violence, a steep rise in deaths by gunshots, and very high mortality among young men. An additional 53,000 deaths due to non-violent causes were estimated to have occurred above the pre-invasion mortality rate, most of them in recent months, suggesting a worsening of health status and access to health care.

Methods: Between May and July 2006 a national cluster survey was conducted in Iraq to assess deaths occurring during the period from January 1, 2002, through the time of survey in 2006. Information on deaths from 1,849 households containing 12,801 persons was collected. This survey followed a similar but smaller survey conducted in Iraq in 2004. Both surveys used standard methods for estimating deaths in conflict situations, using population-based methods.

Key Findings: Death rates were 5.5/1000/year pre-invasion, and overall, 13.2/1000/year for the 40 months post-invasion. We estimate that through July 2006, there have been 654,965 excess deaths–fatalities above the pre-invasion death rate–in Iraq as a consequence of the war. Of post-invasion deaths, 601,027 were due to violent causes. Non-violent deaths rose above the pre-invasion level only in 2006. Since March 2003, an additional 2.5% of Iraq's population have died above what would have occurred without conflict.

The proportion of deaths ascribed to coalition forces has diminished in 2006, though the actual numbers have increased each year. Gunfire remains the most common reason for death, though deaths from car bombing have increased from 2005. Those killed are predominantly males aged 15-44 years.

…

Deaths were recorded only if the person dying had lived in the household continuously for three months before the event. In cases of death, additional questions were asked in order to establish the cause and circumstances of deaths (while considering family sensitivities). At the conclusion of the interview in a household where a death was reported, the interviewers were to ask for a copy of the death certificate. In 92% of instances when this was asked, a death certificate was present.

White House Press Conference, 11 October 2006:

Q Thank you, Mr. President. Back on Iraq. A group of American and Iraqi health officials today released a report saying that 655,000 Iraqis have died since the Iraq war. That figure is 20 times the figure that you cited in December, at 30,000. Do you care to amend or update your figure, and do you consider this a credible report?

George Bush: No, I don’t consider it a credible report. Neither does General Casey and neither do Iraqi officials. I do know that a lot of innocent people have died, and that troubles me and it grieves me. And I applaud the Iraqis for their courage in the face of violence. I am amazed that this is a society which so wants to be free that they’re willing to — that there’s a level of violence that they tolerate. And it’s now time for the Iraqi government to work hard to bring security in neighborhoods so people can feel at peace.

No question, it’s violent, but this report is one — they put it out before, it was pretty well — the methodology was pretty well discredited. But I talk to people like General Casey and, of course, the Iraqi government put out a statement talking about the report.

Q — the 30,000, Mr. President? Do you stand by your figure, 30,000?

Bush: You know, I stand by the figure. A lot of innocent people have lost their life — 600,000, or whatever they guessed at, is just — it’s not credible. Thank you.

Harry Frankfurt, On Bullshit (1986/2005):

One of the most salient features of our culture is that there is so much bullshit. …The realms of advertising and of public relations, and the nowadays closely related realm of politics, are replete with instances of bullshit so unmitigated that they can serve among the most indisputable and classic paradigms of the concept.

Further reading:

• Lindsay Beyerstein, Majikthise (2006-10-11): Over half a million additional deaths in Iraq since US invasion
• Glenn Greenwald, Unclaimed Territory (2006-10-11): Counting Iraqi Deaths

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said Tuesday a North Korean nuclear test would be a very provocative act and the United States would have to assess its options should it be carried out.

Rice’s warning, at a news conference in Cairo, reflected widespread concern within the Bush administration. She stressed, however, that a North Korean test was an issue for the neighborhood and not just for the United States.

It would be a very provocative act, she said. Still, she said, they have not yet done it.

Rice did not elaborate on the options she said the United States would consider if North Korea followed through on it threat.

— Ann Gearan, Forbes.com (2006-10-03): U.S.: N. Korea Nuclear Test Unacceptable

Now, I reject, root and branch, the whole terror-empire geopolitics that are so proudly endorsed by both the ruling Right and the Cold War liberals who dominate the Loyal Opposition. But suppose that you take those ideas on their own terms for a second. The strategic question that Rice’s blustering raises is this. Even granting the legitimacy of the enterprise, given the way the United States is hopelessly mired in ever-worsening civil wars in both Iraq and Afghanistan, not to mention whatever the endgame for the increasingly bellicose diplomatic confrontation with Iran may be, just what options does the United States realistically have left at this point?

Everything has limits, even global superpowers. The War Party, especially in its more bellicose factions, fantasizes that the United States has the muscle, resources, know-how, and will to sustain itself as the head of a geopolitical power structure which amounts to world empire in everything but name; and it is precisely these people who are most fond of passing themselves off as hard-nosed policy realists against the saccharine dreams of hippies, pacifist zealots, moonbats, the terminally clueless, and countless other denizens of whatever La-La Land they imagine you have to be from to possibly have doubts about the latest march to war. But they are wrong, dead wrong, and their pose is growing more evidently absurd every day. Unfortunately, we, not they, will be forced to deal with the human consequences of the colossal disasters they are pulling us into.

While Donald Rumsfeld and his chuckle-headed apologists crow about the outcome of the Bush administration’s use of lies and deceit to justify war on Iraq, we might remember that the war zone created in Baghdad has led to a couple things: armed Islamist militias controlled by local clerics and the rise of rape and terror against women.

Zeinab, a 24-year-old computer science major who declined to give her last name, would drive her own car to college before the U.S. invasion, but now she’s only permitted to leave the house for school with the man she jokingly calls her driver-bodyguard-chaperon.

The beauty salons she used to frequent for pedicures and conversation are closed, so Zeinab spends much of her long hours at home in front of a mirror, practicing different hairstyles for the day she regains a social life.

Girls lost most of their freedom here a long time ago, but now we’ve lost it all, she said angrily. They want to protect our honor.

[LA Times]

And:

Sheik Nasseri, for instance, has been giving the Friday sermon at the main mosque in Sadr City, where he has railed against Americans as infidel colonizers and sanctioned the killing of unveiled women who refuse to comply with his rules, as well as the killing of Muslims or non-Muslims who sell liquor.

[NY Times]

Just in case you have forgotten: these are the same conditions–precisely the same conditions–that led to the establishment of the Islamist tyranny in Iran, and were used to justify forced veiling and other misogynist repression. And they are also the same conditions–precisely the same conditions that led to the horrors of the Taliban in Afghanistan.

So thanks, Donald, for lying to us about weapons of mass destruction in order to carry out your dirty little war. What an awful outcome indeed.

For the past 5 years feminists have been doing most of the work in understanding and combatting the Taliban regime in Afghanistan. The Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan is one of the largest and most firmly-established anti-Taliban resistance groups in the world. The Feminist Majority Foundation’s Campaign to Stop Gender Apartheid in Afghanistan has been the authority in the US on the Taliban regime for nearly five years (Eleanor Smeal has given briefings to Congress on the topic and has testified before a joint hearing of two U.S. Senate Foreign Relations subcommittees). Acclaimed journalist Saira Shah lived undercover as an Afghan woman (with the assistance of RAWA) to make her groundbreaking documentary, Beneath the Veil. Because the first victims of the Taliban were women, women and women’s groups, abroad and also in the U.S., are the most credible authorities on the Taliban regime.

And yet, somehow or another it ended up happening that only 12% of television programs have featured women as experts on the post-September 11 crises [FMF], even after the U.S. alleged the complicity of the Taliban in the attacks. Instead, they are trotting out the predictable crowd of old white male pundits: generals, retired CIA operatives, State Department cronies. In the time since September 11, I have seen networks, without a trace of irony, put Bob McNamara, Henry Kissinger, and Oliver North in front of the camera as experts on what we ought to do about international terrorism. Well, I guess they ought to know–when it comes to terrorism, maybe it takes one to know one!

So, while the media drumbeat for the war continues it’s the same old cock-swinging commandos droning on about Afghanistan. The same CIA and State Department cronies who propped up the Mujahedeen and the Taliban in the first place, who trained Osama bin Laden because they believed that foreign jihadi were more reliable opponents of the pro-Soviet regime than locals. And since women’s voices are being silenced, no-one much seems to be pointing out that Afghan women were the first and most horrifically victimized by the Taliban regime. That Afghan women, who are imprisoned in their homes and banned from driving or travelling without a male relative on pain of death, cannot escape the cluster bombs dropping over their heads. That women continue to be oppressed our equally thuggish allies in the Northern Alliance (who are nothing more than the old Mujahedeen). That women have repeatedly been cut out of the tribal councils on forming a new government, and the U.S. government can’t be bothered to give a damn whether or not equity for women is brought up as an issue in the formation and constitution of a post-Taliban State.

The mealy-mouthed monologue of the corporate/government-colonized newsmedia has been parroting the words of feminists that they ignored for years–deploying a weak brand of pop feminism against the Taliban to keep the war fervor high. And yet, somehow, it seems that the actual women are not being included in the dialogue, and the actual needs facing women in Afghanistan are not being discussed.

What a fucking surprise.