"Somehow They Died": The Iraq War, Civilian Deaths, and the Meaning of Objectivity

Part I: Media Omissions on the 20th Anniversary of the Iraq War

Popular culture in the United States emphasizes patriotic pageantry over the unsavory elements of war. There are no shortages of blockbuster movies, video games, advertisement campaigns, songs, and community events paying lip service to the heroism and importance of the U.S. military.

The closest our cultural “common sense” comes to confronting the realities of warfare is to offer soldiers amorphous “thanks” for the nebulously defined adversity they undergo when serving in uniform.

Questions of when we ought to go to war, our nation's foreign policy history, the moral ambiguities and inescapable terrors and destructiveness of warfare are muted. They are subsumed by perfunctory praise of the military, patriotic slogans, and nationalistic rituals celebrating our nation’s “moral virtue” — our collective goodness.

Dominant culture makes it impious to question the just nature of our nation's wars or to openly discuss the often sharp contrast between the public’s movie screen mediated understanding of war and the experiences of soldiers and civilians with firsthand knowledge of combat zones.

We are comparably much more comfortable with calling into question the misdeeds of nation’s identified as our enemy. Yet our nation has not yet developed the cultural maturity—the courage and humility—to comprehend the morally confounding carnage of our government’s military actions such as the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

Ukraine and Iraq: An “Inappropriate” Comparison

In July 2023, CNN’s Anderson Cooper told philosopher, Cornel West, that he felt the U.S. was obligated to militarily intervene against Russia on behalf of Ukraine. “Unchecked he [Vladimir Putin] will slaughter people.” West, who is running to become the Green Party's 2024 presidential candidate, affirmed Anderson’s concerns about Putin and added that great harm has resulted from U.S. government’s unimpeded use of military force.

“Unchecked Unchecked he [Putin] will slaughter folk. Unchecked what we did in Iraq was slaughtering people. Unchecked what we've done in other places—”

Flummoxed by West’s comparison of the U.S. invasion of Iraq and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Anderson interjected a chastisement of West.

“But sir, Dr. West, Dr. West, do you really…. I respect you, you know I love you, but I do think it's inappropriate to compare the Russian bombing of Grozny and what we witnessed there with the war in Iraq. To say that innocents—innocents are killed, there's no doubt about it. Horrible things happen.”

Anderson’s reference to “Grozny” pertains to the Russian military’s October 1999 attack on the Chechen capital of Grozny. The series of missile strikes resulted in the deaths of hundreds of people.

As Anderson spoke, West’s eyebrows arched upward with moral indignation. “Half a million Iraqis killed, my brother?,” West asked, leaning toward the camera. “Half a million?”

“I'm just saying I don't think its accurate to compare the pummeling of a city by Russian artillery with civilians inside,” Anderson retorted, stumbling over his words, “pummeling every single day with the intention of just destroying and flattening a city with actions the U.S. took.”

The exchange was unique for at least two reasons. First, it was a rare moment in corporate media where the shocking civilian death toll from the U.S. invasion of Iraq was candidly mentioned and attributed to the United States of America. According to two studies, the Iraqi death toll exceeded 600,000 by 2006.

Researchers with John Hopkins School of Public Health published a study in The Lancet concluding "as many as 654,965 more Iraqis may have died" from invasion related causes during the first 40 months of the war. The study was based on household surveys conducted in 2006. A similar conclusion was reached by the Iraq Family Health Survey Study Group, which surveyed more than 9,000 Iraqi households in 2006. Their study, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, concluded 601,027 Iraqis were killed due to violence, over 40 months, in excess of the violent deaths from the prior year.

For context, Russia's sanguinary invasion of Ukraine has resulted in the deaths of as many 50,000 Russian soldiers, at least 9,369 Ukrainian civilians, and as many as 17,500 Ukrainian soldiers. There are currently no comprehensive and objective studies of total deaths from the war, but it appears that Russia’s invasion has caused around 80,000 deaths 17 months into the war.

The point is not to promote a callous competition of body counting. Nor is the point to suggest we ought to ignore or downplay the carnage Russia is visiting upon Ukraine at this time. The simple point is that there is no justification for minimizing the horrors of the Iraq War or suggesting the Iraqi people suffered less as a result of the U.S. invasion in March 2003 than the Ukrainians are now due to the Russian invasion.

U.S. media outlets failed again and again to identify the agent responsible for causing Iraqi civilian deaths. They described the Iraq War dead as one would describe geological formations, the result of natural and taken-for-granted forces; something that just “happened.

Anderson’s inability to comprehend or tolerate the comparison of the U.S.’s unjust invasion of Iraq with an unjust invasion by Russia offers a glimpse into a wider culture of denial about the impact our nation has and continues to have on the world stage. At a minimum, it reveals a failure of those in power to come to terms with the horrifying consequences of the Iraq War 20-years after its launch.

In place of robust, radically open, and authentic discussion of warfare and military service we have a public discourse hampered by idolatrous deference to political authority and a spiritually impoverished mythology of America. The mass media’s coverage of the 20th anniversary of the invasion of Iraq showcased the failure of such discourse to seriously examine the life and death consequences of U.S. military policy.

Hidden Agency: They Died from the War

Nowhere is dominant media culture more silent than on the subject of non-American civilian deaths in our wars and on the responsibility of U.S. government leaders for those casualties. Many of the very leaders who have made deadly errors of judgment are routinely featured as prominent, expert voices in current matters of war and peace. Meanwhile those as passionate about peace and diplomacy as others are about using military means to resolve international conflict are far less likely to sit before corporate media cameras.

Direct acknowledgment of U.S. responsibility in the deaths of Iraqi civilians has and continues to be notably absent from mainstream media discussions of the 2003 Iraq War. News networks use language that fails all together to attribute Iraqi/civilian deaths to any particular cause outside of “the war.” The individual and organizational agents responsible for such deaths go unmentioned.

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A clear instance of “hiding agency” occurred in an ABC News piece (March 22, 2023) that productively explored the trauma endured by U.S. veterans. The article also offered competing veteran perspectives on the war, with one veteran arguing the removal of Saddam Hussein justified the war, and another arguing that the war was unjust and involved mistreatment of civilians. Not once did the article refer to the civilians the U.S. was responsible for killing. The only mention of Iraqi deaths read, “Reports by groups, such as the nonprofit online database the Iraq Body Count, said that nearly 200,000 Iraqi civilians were killed during those years.” Take note of the language used. Iraqi civilians “were killed,” but by whom, for what reason, and under what circumstances?

U.S. media outlets failed again and again to identify the agent responsible for causing Iraqi civilian deaths. They described the Iraq War dead as one would describe geological formations, the result of natural and taken-for-granted forces; something that just “happened.

A March 19, 2023 USA Today piece article on the anniversary of the war made just one fleeting mention of the civilian dead: "At least 100,000 Iraqi civilians dead.” The only mention of civilian casualties in the Associated Press’ March 17, 2023 piece read:

“For Iraqis, the enduring trauma of the violence that followed is undeniable—an estimated 300,000 Iraqis were killed between 2003 and 2019, according to the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown University, as were more than 8,000 U.S. military, contractors and civilians.”

Multiple media outlets used similarly passive language for their reports including NPR (March 19, 2023, March 21, 2023), Axios (March 16, 2023), the Los Angeles Times (March 23, 2023), and The Pew Research Center (March 14, 2023). The New York Times’ March 20, 2023 piece mentioned the civilian death toll in passing and without attribution:

“Iraq lost nearly half a million civilians in the war and the subsequent eight-year American occupation, which Mr. Rumsfeld vowed would never occur.”

Note the use of the word “lost” to describe civilians killed during the U.S.-led war and the disappearance of any agency behind or responsibility for those “losses.”

Equally vacuous and uninformative statements are commonly used to describe Iraqi dead. The New York Time's lesson plan on the Iraq War, "Six Ways to Learn About the Iraq War," invites students to ask why the U.S. invaded Iraq, how the war changed Iraq, what war photography revealed about the war, how the war shaped Iraqi children, how the war strengthened Iran, and how U.S. soldiers are trying to make sense of the war.

Students are not asked to contemplate the moral implications of our military having killed thousands through bombing and ground combat during the invasion. Nor are they asked to contemplate what constitutes a just war, or what appropriate consequences should befall leaders responsible for such catastrophic decisions. Instead, the lesson plan numbly reports, “Iraq lost [my emphasis] nearly a half-million civilians in the war and the subsequent eight-year American occupation.”

Such omissions in identifying the agent responsible the “losses” may, at first glance, appear trivial. But the way we use words matter because they frame and coordinate—giving meaning or significance to—our sensorial reality. Passively constructing Iraqi death enables the cognitively dissonant moralizing of the kind Anderson and so many others articulate. The narrative of American exceptionalism—our commitment to liberating the oppressed and protecting the innocent and vulnerable—does not comport with the bewildering body count of innocents resulting from our wars in Iraq, Vietnam, Korea, and the Philippines.

While many media outlets made passing and decontextualized mention of civilian deaths, others omitted them all together. A March 2023 piece by the Veterans of Foreign Wars recalled the “swift and successful” invasion of Iraq without reference to the resulting civilian deaths. Other commemorative news reports—like this one by NPR, and this one by a CBS News affiliate—failed to even mention civilian casualties.

Objectivity is Not Detachment

Anodyne reporting on war dead not only fails to honor objectivity, but also obscures fundamental matters of concern to those of us who value life and living in truthful relation to reality. The manner of reporting cited above exemplifies the error of imagining objectivity as intellectual and ethical “detachment” and anonymity. For information to be meaningful—for understanding to be possible—facts must be placed into their relevant context. As Erich Fromm explained in Escape From Freedom (1941), the belief equating accumulated information with knowledge is a superstition.

“The pathetic superstition prevails that by knowing more and more facts one arrives at knowledge of reality….To be sure, thinking without a knowledge of facts remains empty and fictitious; but ‘information’ alone can be just as much an obstacle to thinking as the lack of it.”

English philosopher John Stuart Mill made much the same point, in On Liberty (1859), when he wrote, “Very few facts are able to tell their own story, without comments to bring out their meaning.” Facts distilled from vital context and elaboration generate misinformation and distorts rather than clarify reality.

By itself, the fact that tens of thousands of Iraqis lives “were lost” during the invasion and occupation of Iraq lacks significance. We are left with information that we cannot meaningfully affix to our cherished values and political commitments. Those concerned with truth and objectivity are not disembodied brain blobs interested only in formulas and figures. As Fromm put it in Man For Himself: An Inquiry into the Psychology of Ethics (1947), human reason aims beyond short-term functionality and shallow truths.

“While reason is not divorced from the practical aims of life..., it is not a mere tool for immediate action. Its function is to know, to understand, to grasp, to relate oneself to things by comprehending them. It penetrates through the surface of things in order to discover their essence, their hidden relations and deeper meanings, their ‘reason.’”

Those of us thinking with the aim of enhancing our relatedness to the world—the real world and all we care about within it—and living consistently with our highest values will need more than passively stated statistics. We will need to know the names of the dead, their ages, and circumstances. We will also need to know how they died, where they were, who killed them, and why. Leaving out such details is a decision, one with epistemological and ethical implications.

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