The Vicious Circle

After describing a near-death experience at a military checkpoint in Baghdad a reporter gets to his real topic:

Afterward I asked their captain how close they had come to killing us. He still had the safety off his M-16, his finger still curled around the trigger. He twitched it imperceptibly. "That close," he said. Had I not been there, but just my Iraqi colleagues or had the driver panicked and reversed or even had they been just a little farther away, no doubt I would not be writing this now. An ending that unfortunately many Iraqis have already suffered, shot at checkpoints and roadstops by jumpy troops, mistaken for possible suicide bombers, bombed by aircraft with faulty targeting information. All those things have indeed happened.

But how often, really? The answer: not very often, in fact. And not nearly often enough to make the 150,000 U.S. and coalition troops in Iraq the leading scourge of Iraq's civilians. That dishonor goes, hands down, to the insurgents. Even one incident is bad, of course, and there have been many. But civilian killings by U.S. troops are not nearly as common as the critics of the war in Iraq would like us to believe. It has become an article of faith among them that American troops have been slaughtering Iraqi civilians indiscriminately, and that one of the consequences of the war has been an unconscionable loss of life among the civilian population. It just isn't true.

To what end? Because Saddam assumed the press backlash against US forces would fuel anti-American sympathies and prevent the fall of Baghdad. But that event took a little less time (and significantly fewer casualties) than the Baathist leadership had estimated. But while the civilian casualties did not occur in the predicted numbers that didn't stop "many" from claiming they indeed had. Saddam woefully underestimated the speed and precision with which the US military would end his regime, but he was dead-on in anticipating the response of a world-wide propaganda machine and the subsequent response from those easily swayed to jihad - and other, less violent support. Thus the irony - and it's a criminal irony, to be honest - is that the inflated reports of civilian casualties go a long way towards inspiring an influx of foreign fighters to Iraq, and thus more civilian casualties there.

And elsewhere for that matter. A point not lost on Arthur Chrenkoff:

We are told that London bombings are a result of Tony Blair's decision to participate in the illegal invasion of Iraq. We are told that the continuing occupation of Iraq, and the carnage and humiliation inflicted upon Iraqi people by the United States, Great Britain and other occupying powers have radicalized some British Muslims to such extent as to push them into becoming suicide bombers on the buses and subways of their adopted country (in some cases their country of birth).

There are 250,000 Iraqis living in Great Britain - that's quarter of a million people, one of the biggest communities in Iraqi diaspora, and just under one sixth of the total British Muslim population of some 1.6 million.

So why, among the original 7/7 bombers, the next lot of recently captured bombers, and all the other people arrested in connection with the attacks, aren't there any British Iraqis?

And by all means read the entire Newsweek piece too.

On a side note - kudos to Newsweek for an innovation. Each of their on-line stories now includes technorati links to every blog that comments on that story - here's the link page for those writing on the above piece. The "front page" of the Newsweek site also includes a list of their "most-blogged about articles". Few blogs offer that much trackback so easily accessible - well done.