War casualty statistics only give an approximate indication of the scale of deaths and injuries, and can really do no more. An elementary principle of measurement taught in Statistics 101 is that in order to measure a quantity of objects in a valid way or assign values to them, the objects must have a common characteristic which defines them as discrete measurement units belonging to a class. (Karl Marx confronted this problem at the beginning of Das Kapital, in trying to get people away from fetishizing prices and focus instead on exchange relations between people). We can hide behind an administrative definition of casualties applied by the military or by hospitals, or focus on demographic patterns, but this rarely captures the full reality. If you have ever worked with mortality statistics, as I have, then you know that the causes of injury and death are manifold, and that it takes theory and analysis to understand the real concatenation of events which produce an increase in mortality rates.
The reality is that even in Vietnam today, people are still dying or ill because of the war, and babies are born with deformities due to the war. In the case of Iraq, a narrow focus on direct war casualties in my opinion misses the wood for the trees, because far more deaths are caused by malnutrition, starvation, misadventure, and illnesses causes by economic chaos, poisoning and the destruction of basic infrastructure. However, it is not easy to establish exactly what the quantitative picture is in that regard, certainly not at this stage, never mind attributing precise causes in an exact way. I think many US policymakers are aware of it, but it is a political hot potato, their focus is on what to do, and nobody inquires into the deeper causes of why all this is happening, that is all just "academic". Except that when hundreds of thousands of people die, then it is not "academic" anymore, then we need to go and talk about something else. My own argument is that the narrow focus on direct war casualties serves an ideological purpose, namely, while demonising Saddam Hussein, attention is drawn away from the gruesome reality of an amount of deaths (mainly civilian deaths) that must ultimately amount to "something like" 2 million from the beginning of the 1990s, extending into the future. Bad policies by Saddam Hussein have been held responsible, while abstracting from the very people in the West who helped enthrone him, supported his regime, provided him with killing technology, deprived Iraqi citizens from food and medical supplies, and then on top of that ravaged his country militarily. That is just to say, that the ideological apology for imperialism creates a definite pattern of abstraction, which prohibits any thinking incompatible with the expansion of market economy, including thinking about imperialism. The real pattern of intervention in Iraq is something which, if people knew it, would make them realise it could not be morally sustained in any way under any conditions. But precisely because this is so, the genocidal policy is denied and hidden, and the focus is placed on an "evil dictator" in response to whom "we are the good guys" seeking to make a humanitarian intervention, and for the rest we prattle a bit about the "clash of civilisations". At a deeper level, this signifies a radical confusion about the meaning of moral responsibility in the West, and this confusion is directly related to that fact that in a society where the allocation of resources is established mainly via the market, it is no longer possible to pinpoint so easily who or what precisely is morally responsible for any given human disaster - human beings are related more and more in ways which escape their control, and hence they can no longer establish any reasonable and objective relationship between individual responsibility and social responsibility. In this context, the Internet contains a potential to disinform just as much as to inform, but what is not even discussed, is the deeper causes and motives for spreading disinformation and obstructing the quest for truth. In reality, there is not really any "humanitarian intervention" beyond individual acts, but only a self-interested political intervention, and the "clash of civilisations" is something which we cause ourselves, and bring on ourselves. As I have noted, the beauty or efficacy of the notion of a "war against terrorism" from an ideological point of view is, that you no longer have to talk about real massive massacres occurring, rather, we are now dealing with an unseen, hidden bunch of individuals who might or might not appear from behind the bushes and attack. At the same time, attention is drawn away from a focus on the real massacres occurring, which we can observe and verify jolly well, if we care to do it, but the sad thing is that the West is mostly indifferent to it, and indeed encourages this indifference. The Left will say things like "we must remove the breeding grounds of terrorism"", which are based on poverty, but this effuse notion mistakes what it is really about, and does not challenge the new ideology of imperialism. And the Left cannot do it, because their globalisation theories provide no coherent analysis. That being the case, the Left also cannot specify a coherent alternative, a "radical vision". A while ago, I attended a meeting in Amsterdam with an African philosopher, and heard from a white gentleman in the audience who was an expert on African affairs. He basically said, that we might as well give up hope that Africa would ever produce a decent, civilised social system. Subsequently, a book was published in Holland which argued more or less the same thing; it was pointless to give aid to Africa, or pretend that the West could solve any of its problems, because the chaos, immorality and corruption was too great there. This is an ideology which generalises broadly from specific instances, and denies the possibility of a theory of human emancipation which is made more and more specific, and applied to specific contexts. And that is the greatest harm of postmodernism: by dismissing theory as "grand narrative" resulting in totalitarian ideologies, it renders us incapable of utilising our brains to devise comprehensive solutions which go to the root of the problems. We no longer even know how to arrive at a good theory. I have noticed this often, because infantile communists would attack me with the most vile derogatory language, only then later to turn around and ask me to provide an answer to the problem they were dealing with. Their snide hatred, their urge to testify, their propensity for questioning the validity of what others experience in order to moralise about it, substitutes personal assertion for real critique and real morality. Which causes me to think of Marx's recommendation to "be on your way, and let people chatter as they will". Postmodernism paves the way for a return to mythology and primitive magic about "the root of the evil" and moral platitudes, and skepticism which dismisses any moral striving beyond personal self-interest or charity as being futile and suspect. Which is why I think that, if we compare the real problems the world faces to the thinking that gets done about it, we are in many respects back to the 19th century qua ideological discourse. But the truth is that postmodernism is merely "the grand narrative that there are no more grand narratives". For a genuine socialist, such a conclusion is of course not satisfactory; he wants to inquire into the causes which lead to such a terrible loss of perspective, in order to arrive at the question of "what is to be done". Jurriaan
