While the US air war against ISIS in Iraq and Syria is mostly over, the Pentagon continues to dutifully release civilian casualty reports that are both preposterously low, and which falsely take credit for efforts to kill fewer civilians.
This latest report put the overall death toll of the US war in both Iraq and Syria to 1,114 civilians, since 2014. Even passing familiarity with NGO figures shows this is far too low. Airwars has put the figure at 6,575 civilians in the same period.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights also issued their own statement just a few days earlier than the Pentagon, estimating that the Pentagon had killed around 3,300 civilians in that period of time, and covering only Syria.
Estimates have shown comparable numbers of deaths in US wars in both Iraq and Syria, but the Pentagon’s official figures skip many of the biggest incidents as “not credible,” and in other cases will offer official death tolls that are a mere fraction of the documented number of bodies found.
The US vastly under reported civilian casualties in all of its recent wars. It did that for wars further back too, to the extent it bothered, like the Philippine Insurrection and the Banana Wars between the World Wars.
It isn’t just the US. I can’t think of a single example of a nation that did not vastly under report civilian casualties that it caused.
This is a reason to be antiwar. It is a problem with war itself. Wars kill people. A lot of them are innocent civilians. It has always been so. See Medieval sieges or Roman “rapes” of conquered lands.
It is war. War is the problem. When it is used as the solution, as the US has been doing, it fails, as the US has also been doing.
Evolutionarily, we’re not that far removed from riding animals around, flinging poo, and beating each other to death with sticks and stones. It’s going to take a loooong time to solve the problem of wanton aggression. I’m convinced that any attempt to short circuit evolution will result in something similar to the movie Serenity.
“It was designed to calm the population and weed out aggression…”
Aggression is old, wanton aggression is relatively new. Last night I went to a presentation on PaleoIndians of New England. Natives would raid other villages and kill, or ally themselves with the English settlers to secure more hunting grounds. Yet when the English would surround a village and start killing every single man women and child, even the attacking natives would chant “ENOUGH!”
A common perception is that extreme violence is part of human nature, only contained by civilized culture. Yet a more accurate statement is that it is a result of culture, enabled by the rise of cities and specialization. The book “Ishmael” is relevant to the topic if you’re interested.
Good book. Tho I recall Quinn attributed agriculture to the rise of specialization, and resultant culture. The native American wars were between competing agricultural societies.
Yes, war is the problem, and when it’s conducted by the US the killing of civilians is always a major art of it. Best examples Hiroshima and Nagasaki, best recent examples the complete destruction of Raqqa and Mosul. The US even had a Marine Corps 155 battalion firing into Raqqa, and who was the FO for that exercise in killing and destruction? When the US military was questioned on city destruction, the response was: Not true, we only use precision weapons against enemy targets.
Raqqa
https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/55a24045c013d10b0b9f9849c8d97dc419fffa03/186_179_2597_1559/master/2597.jpg?width=1900&quality=85&auto=format&fit=max&s=7bcc7ed744230e4c30a31c8c5edeeb4e
Even the 6,000 number is being rather generous to the Pentagon. There were 10,000 civilian deaths at Mosul alone.
Most of those deaths were from the Iraqi security forces calling in artillery to level a building if it had 3 snipers. We claimed the victory but not the body count as long as the Iraqis called in the strikes. So who fired the artillery, the Iraqis or the U.S.?