I like David Aaronovitch. He is one of our country’s leading liberal voices, a brilliant, intelligent and passionate writer and a nice man. He and I agree on a lot. (You can watch us here debating together at the Cambridge Union in defence of political correctness — our side won!) But he is wrong about Iraq. He always has been.
I hesitate before taking a pot shot at Aaronovitch because I did so only a few weeks ago, in a column on torture (and he emailed to point out that he had been the first to flag up the Jack Bauer angle). Nonetheless, in the language of the playground, “he started it”, so I’ll respond.
In his column in the Times on Tuesday, Aaronovitch ridicules those of us who opposed the war, calls the Iraqi elections a “bloody miracle” and deplores seven years of “goddamned” discussion of WMDs, legality, and so on. Time to move on, says Aaro.
Let me begin by highlighting some points on which he and I agree.
1) It is both miraculous and inspiring that Iraq is able to conduct multiparty parliamentary elections seven years on from the fall of Saddam Hussein.
2) Torture was indeed much, much worse and more widespread under Saddam Hussein than it is in Iraq today.
3) There has never been a proper debate about what would have happened to Iraq if Saddam Hussein had been left in power in 2003. What were the alternatives, if any?
But in Aaronovitch’s column, entitled “Iraq has moved forward. It’s time we did, too“, there is a glaring omission. How many Iraqis died in order to build this new Mesopotamian democracy, what he calls “one of the most hopeful changes in recent times”? Or, to rephrase the question, how many Iraqis were unable to vote in these historic elections because they’d been killed in the period since March 2003?
He does make one passing reference to the death and destruction inflicted by the invaders and the insurgents in Iraq:
In the first place it has made it almost impossible to discuss the Iraqis themselves, to consult them or listen to them. They have become ghosts, invoked as (implausible) casualty figures, or seen on TV briefly lamenting a death or maiming.
“Ghosts” is an interesting choice of word. But I’m confused. Does he think casualty figures are not important, or that they are all “implausible”? Does he, like General Tommy Franks, not “do bodycounts”? Or can he tell us how many Iraqis he thinks have been killed in the violence unleashed by our illegal (yes, David, illegal) invasion in 2003? If not, how can he expect us to “move on”? How can we do a proper audit of the war?
Nobody knows for sure how many Iraqis died, or were killed, as a result of the invasion, but there are several different, credible and respected estimates, ranging from 100,000 to a million-plus.
There’s Iraq Body Count:
95,593 to 104,291
There’s the calculation by Associated Press:
more than 110,600
There’s the Lancet survey:
601,027 violent deaths out of 654,965 excess deaths
There’s the ORB survey:
1,033,000
Which one does Aaronovitch agree with? Any of them? None of them?
On a side note, I smiled to see Aaronovitch smear those of us in the “anti-war brigade” as “Shortists”. But, of course, Clare Short did not oppose the Iraq war. She voted for it, and stayed in the cabinet, resigning only after the invasion had occurred.
He could have called us “Cookists” or “Denhamists“, but he chose not to. Perhaps because it is much more difficult to dismiss Robin Cook and John Denham as naive peaceniks, Islamist appeasers or Saddam apologists than it is to dismiss Clare Short, George Galloway, Tony Benn or the rest of the usual suspects. I’m just wondering . . .
Content from our partners
Related
