Reasonable
Imaginary numbers
December 23, 2008 13 comments
Via the indispensable Aaronowitch Watch (Incorporating “World of Decency”), I see that David Aaronovitch still thinks he was right to be in favour of invading Iraq — well, maybe a smidgeon less right than he used to be, but still much more right than those who weren’t, because they are “anti-history”. (Duh, the war has already happened, people, quit your goddamned whinging.) ((I’m aware that this is not what Aaronovitch means by “anti-history”, but choose this reading nonetheless because it is at least consistent: after all, his own account of history strangely omits the fact, reported in his own newspaper among others, that Tony Blair had already in 2002 secretly agreed to Bush’s war. Instead Aaronovitch perpetuates the myth about the sincere “diplomacy” that “failed”.)) But enough already about Tony Blair and George W. Bush (“and, by extension, me”, Aaronovitch adds modestly) — for David Aaronovitch himself is having a “crisis of conscience”. He has just realised, you see, that a lot of people were, after all, killed following the invasion he desired. How many? Aaronovitch conjures a nice round figure using nothing but the power of his mind:
[t]he reasonable figure for lost Iraqi lives — perhaps 100,000 — is far more than any hawk allowed before the fight began.
As Bruschettaboy at AW(IWoD) points out, the Iraq Body Count figure is between 89,959 and 98,218 at present: if Aaronovitch were aware of it he would have to believe that only somewhere between 2,000 and 10,000 deaths over five years have escaped the notice of Iraqi officials and the media. (Moreover, IBC only counts civilian deaths — it’s interesting how rarely you hear anyone express even theoretical sympathy for, let alone try to count, the members of the Iraqi military forces killed by the invasion, as though we can all happily agree that they were exclusively rabid Saddamists, dictators-in-waiting to a man.) Meanwhile, of course, other estimates of Iraqi deaths attributable to the war are much larger. ((Aaronovitch says that “jihadis caused most of these deaths”; while the 2006 Lancet report figure for Iraqis killed by the “coalition” in particular up until then is 86% higher than the “reasonable” figure he now pulls out of his arse for the grand total of all deaths.))
How, then, has Aaronovitch arrived at the figure of 100,000 total deaths? Bruschettaboy writes:
Facts never really were Aaro’s strong point — I am guessing that he picked on a number some time in 2005 and hasn’t updated it. Frankly I regard this as a culpable mistake, though.
But Aaronovitch’s use of “reasonable” here strikes me as more weaselly and solipsistic than that. Come on, be reasonable. Those really high death counts are too nasty, aren’t they? Let’s just make up a sort of average between zero (what the figure would have been in my and my friends’ exciting fantasy magic war scenario) and some large number that it’s too uncomfortable to think about. And by this unimpeachably creative method we get — what? Perhaps 100,000. Sure, perhaps it’s as high as that. But it’s probably lower! Let’s act as though these numbers don’t tally the deaths of real individuals but just have a reasonable conversation about what perhaps is the case if you squint and wave your hands.
I submit, then, that “the reasonable figure” means “the figure I just made up which causes me personally the least amount of cognitive dissonance while not being so low as to look completely ridiculous to a casual reader”. Reality is often not reasonable, but it is the glory of newspaper opinion columnists that they can be, no matter what the facts.
In other news, Pope Ratzinger has been widely reported as saying something like “homosexuality is as big a threat to the planet as global warming!!!!11oneoneone”, which makes for a pleasantly absurd Christmas headline. In fact, that’s not quite what he said, though the exact meaning of what he did say is anybody’s guess, and should make, I hope, for some enjoyable hermeneutical sessions for all the bloated post-festive-dinner family.
Have a reasonable Christmas, readers!
If one were to linger with the word “reasonable”, surely another buried implication would soon unearth itself: that by some measures of accounting, the loss of these Iraqi lives was a reasonable – that is, justifiable, commensurate, proportionate – loss, even if slightly higher than the high-flying hawks predicted. Sure, Aaronovitch seems to be staring off into the middle distance, dismayed and distraught at the very thought of bloodshed, but he sandwiches this “reasonable” assessment between uncertainty over whether an invasion was the right thing to do (after all, an inquiry ‘won’t and can’t tell us whether “it was worth it”’) and the belief that most of the deaths were caused by jihadists – oh, and by the way, “at some point, such a conflict might have happened anyway.”
And thanks for providing a link for a sobering account of the Pope’s actual words; having only read the BBC’s story, I was under the impression that the Vatican was somehow recognising Queer Theory as a reasonable doctrine to dispute. Anyway, I’m off now, to go see the Wu Tang Clan, whose metaphysics are never exceeded, and whose conception of human ecology is definitely in the right direction.
Thankyou.
Yes, that too! And thank you for holding up this bit for derision:
Maybe, although without all the people bombed to death by the US & UK, obviously. In any case we are not really talking about killing people but, as Aaronovitch fastidiously prefers to put it, “lost Iraqi lives”. Careless of them.
If we leave all other considerations aside (hard to do when Aaronovitch is scribbling) and just concentrate on the number of deaths, there is a very interesting thing going on here that very few people have noticed.
Aaronovitch is settling for the 100,000 figure because he knows it’s a great deal higher. No one disputes the scale of the slaughter in Darfur, which is regularly reported as genocide. However, the very same statistical techniques (actual body counts are too dangerous) that classes Darfur as genocide calculates that the deaths in Iraq is approximately 1 million.
And if you read books by Ali Allawi, Cockburn and Chandrasekaran, for instance, you will go away staggered at the disaster that has befallen Iraq. Many of the attacks on the oil pipelines were by the “security” who were paid to protect the oil; at no point did the “coalition” think of sealing Iraq’s borders to stop the jihadi fruitcakes who initiated the Shia-Sunni civil war; that the US did its best to snuff out any democratic elections; and my personal favourite Feith programme, as it were, was the idea that Iraq should be allowed to fall into the abyss so that Iraqis would turn to Chalabi!
No wonder Aaronovitch neatly sidesteps all this, but settles on the very low figure of 100, 000, as if he ever cared. When did he ever demand that the coalition count the dead? What a disgrace. “Reasonable” is a word Aaronovitch latches on to so as to continue hiding the scale of the calamity.
I agree with #4, except this bit:
Just to be clear on the matter: “actual body counts” are not obtained not because they are too dangerous but because they are impossible. In the United States, where people and mortality data are very, very closely monitored and where institutions are intact (hospitals, morgues, public health monitoring agencies, and so on), it is impossible to get complete mortality data or “actual body counts” of everybody who dies in a given period. If it’s not possible in a functioning society with tremendous resources designed to caputre this information, it’s definitely not going to be possible in Iraq, with no infrastructure, where deaths are often violent, where there is a refugee crisis, where bombs destroy whole families (i.e., bodies and witnesses at once), where there are mass graves, and so on.
This is not just pedantry. It has an important implication, which is apparent in Aaronovitch’s peice: since IBC and the Lancet studies are based on “statistics” and not “actual body counts”, anybody can just jump in and offer their own statistical assessment! And why get into the nitty-gritty of what statistical techniques one is actually using? This is precisely what is buried in the term “reasonable” as discussed above. A second implication is this, and it’s slightly more skewed: the inability to get an “actual body count” or a decent approximation beyond the wildly variant statistics offered by the Lancet and IBC is in part a function of the very policies that have raised that body count: invading a country, bombing, the collapse of infrastructure, and so on. The exculpatory uncertainty of the numbers of deaths (we can’t really know, it might be lower, who can be sure? we mustn’t jump to conclusions, those people who give high numbers have such a massive confidence interval, they are just using statistics, etc.) is part of the crime itself.
BTW, it’s worth adding, those people who obtained the data for the Lancet studies risked life and limb to do so.
Okay, I actually didn’t agree with the rest of the sentence either:
A statistical technique does not classify any death as “genocide” – genocide is based on policy and intent.
I didn’t want to linger too long with the Aaronovitch piece, but the line I found most unsettling is from that same paragraph. As has been noted, Aaronovitch tosses out the factually-suspect thought fragment that jidahists are responsible for the majority of the deaths:
What does he mean that it is of “minimal comfort”? Obviously, he doesn’t find it very comfortable, but he does find some minimal comfort, and then some consolation? The effect of his litotes is to smear phony sentiment – the anguish of minimal comfort, the need for consolation, the liberal’s sympathy – over the harsh (if phony) logic of the reasonable.
At least I think it is litotes.
Clearly, my way of getting back at my employer for having me work on Christmas Eve is to spend the entire day devoted to writing comments on Unspeak.net.
“SW”,
Strictly speaking, you are correct: genocide is about intent, not about numbers, something I disagree with. I’ve always thought that a separate distinct category of “mass murder” should apply. Auschwitz is genocide (the very definition, even) and so is Rwanda, while, say, US “involvement” in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos was mass murder, not genocide.
Curiously, Srebrenica is considered a genocide but My Lai is not. Given that both are very similar atrocities, it is left to all those who grasp for the label “genocide” at the drop of a hat for Srebrenica to explain why My Lai is not considered “genocide”.
I think that questioning how and when the term “genocide” is applied is an important thing to do – as well as recognising that whatever term one uses will always be inadequate. That having been said, not every dire consequence of war is genocide, regardless of statistics or the quantification of unquantifiable miseries. So, I think a fairly sound case can be made that the mass murders of Srebenica were part of a genocide whereas the mass murders at My Lai were not, based on definition, policy, intent, and authority.
That is an excellent point.
Re “minimal comfort”: I think it’s litotes too!
Their loss; our gain. Merry Christmas Eve.
‘Genocide’ is so limiting a concept that we might be better off without it. Without reviewing the genocide literature, I think it’s safe to say that genocide has two necessary elements: that the killing spree in question be systematic, and that it be aimed at a ‘gens’, a Latin word which has come to mean any group of people whom others recognize as a distinct group.
If there are ten speakers left of a dying language, and if someone decides to wipe out that ethnolinguistic community by killing those ten people, that would be genocide. If someone wipes out a diverse, polyglot city like New York with a nuclear attack, that would not be genocide because New Yorkers are not a distinct ‘gens’.
This is why there was so much fumbling around a few years ago as to whether the war in Darfur could be called a genocide. Honestly, I don’t think that it is a genocide. I think it’s awful and that other nations should act to oppose it, but nomads versus farmers is not technically genocide.
Under the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, 78 U.N.T.S. 277, a finding of genocide obligates preventive action by other nations (Article 8). But massive killing in general does not rise to the same level of attention as long as we are obsessed with genocide per se.
We might be better off if we replace genocide with the broader category of ‘crimes against humanity’ as far as obligations to intervene are concerned. What is happening in Darfur is definitely crimes against humanity. The Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court defines a ‘crime against humanity’ as any of several acts that are part of a ‘widespread or systematic attack directed against any civilian population’, the key word being ‘any’.
Jeff’s comment above was the 4,000th comment ever posted to unspeak.net! Congratulations, Jeff! For more Jeff, readers should hurry to Jeff’s post at 3 Quarks Daily today, “The Jennifer Aniston In All Of Us”.
Thanks for the props.
And congratulations!
…for grimly maintaining a weblog until it has attracted 4,000 comments? Thanks!