Iraq: wilful ignorance, study

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Iraq: wilful ignorance, study

Postby Penta » Mon Jul 19, 2010 11:28 am

http://aoav.org.uk/docs/A%20State%20of%20Ignorance.pdf


Labour turned a blind eye to Iraq casualties

A new report reveals Labour's near-pathological state of denial about the cost in human life of the 2003 invasion and aftermath

Comments (88)

o Chris Ames
o guardian.co.uk, Monday 19 July 2010 10.00 BST

Adam Ingram Adam Ingram, former minister for the armed forces, said counting civilian casualties in Iraq would not have stopped them occurring. Photograph: Christopher Furlong/Getty

Did Labour care how many people died as a result of the Iraq war? It seems only to have cared that people might find out. A new report, A State of Ignorance from Action on Armed Violence (AOAV, formerly Landmine Action) shows how ministers and officials bent over backwards to avoid engaging with the issue, except to try to confuse it. Wilful ignorance is really the only way to describe it.

The cost in human life of the 2003 invasion and its aftermath is one of those issues that divides people as bitterly as the legitimacy of the war itself – and usually along similar lines. Those who oppose the war cite shockingly high figures, which are disputed by the invasion's apologists. For the last government, the whole issue was as welcome as Banquo at the feast and Labour remains in a near-pathological state of denial.

The AOAV report doesn't endorse any particular figure. It doesn't endorse any particular methodology or even claim that reaching an estimate is straightforward. It does argue that governments have to try to understand the impact of a decision to go to war and shows how Labour was determined not even to try.

The Iraq inquiry has been sent a copy of the report and Adam Ingram, the former minister for the armed forces, was asked about the issue at a hearing on Friday. Sir Roderick Lyne pointed out that Labour had for years stuck "parrot-like" to the line that there were no reliable figures: "Why couldn't the government make some estimate of Iraqi civilian deaths when others could?"

Ingram's first few words were as poorly chosen and callous as you could imagine. "To what purpose?" he asked. Pressed on the issue, he reeled off a list of reasons, including the divisive political debate, doubts that NGOs are "the fount of all wisdom and knowledge and accuracy", worries over security, and a mysterious hint that he was "not so sure it wasn't being done" somewhere in government. He pointed out that counting civilian casualties – in the period after the invasion – would not have stopped them occurring and even suggested that they might have occurred at any time under Saddam Hussein. But Labour had not discounted the extent of the problem: "We were not saying these [estimates] were downright lies."

The reality of what Labour did is not far short, though. The AOAV report systematically compares and contrasts the "onstage" statements of the government against what freedom of information (FOI) releases show was happening "offstage":

"The FOI material that this report is based on suggests officials selectively used information to undermine studies that estimated relatively high casualty figures, made little effort to develop a systematic understanding of the tallies being offered, and did seemingly nothing to ensure figures were produced by the Iraqi government as the UK said it should."

Labour was particularly keen to discredit the 2004 Lancet study, which gave a very high figure (at that stage) of approximately 98,000 "excess deaths", and a similar report two years later with a figure of 655,000. "Excess deaths" means the number of people who die in a war or crisis situation above a baseline mortality rate. One of the points that AOAV makes is that the previous government never publicly recognised the difference between this phenomenon and that of deaths directly caused by violence, which is significantly lower, although this distinction was understood by at least some officials.

Behind the scenes, officials can also be seen to have cynically looked for grounds to reject the 2004 Lancet study and to have identified but ignored other surveys that seem "to harm our argument rather than help".

The report also shows how the government's public statements during 2004, most notably from Foreign Office minister Baroness Symons, changed from a position of asserting that figures from Iraq's ministry of health were "not reliable" and not accurate, because not all victims of attacks were notified through official systems, to asserting that the Ministry's figures were the "most reliable", because hospitals had "no obvious reason to under-report the number of dead and injured".

For the most part, the government then settled on a position of passing responsibility for assessing civilian deaths to the Iraqi government and ignoring other studies. They really didn't want to know.

The AOAV paper also contains a revealing chapter on what it calls the limitations of material released under the Freedom of Information Act. These limitations include the policy of releasing information with as little context as possible, making it very hard to interpret, and the inconsistent application of the act between departments. One document was released almost in full in response to a 2007 request and in a highly censored form following a different request two years later. The over-zealous official with the black-marker pen presumably didn't realise that his or her efforts to protect colleagues from embarrassment were in vain.

There is also an illustration of how FOI triggers an even deeper and more damaging level of mendacity in Whitehall. In 2007 an official expressed concern that "if we started using figures internally now as a measurement of progress, we would risk having to release them under an FOI request, which would contradict previous statements that we do not collate or endorse any casualty figures".

The point that the report makes is not merely that a mendacious government sought to distort the public debate about an issue on which it was politically vulnerable but that its deliberate refusal to address the issue left a hole in the information needed to evaluate and make policy. Turning a blind eye became so pervasive that even when the truth was no longer quite so shocking, it dare not be established, let alone told, because that could expose a previous lie.

When you are in a hole, keep digging, continues to be the Labour mantra on Iraq. But Ingram and co are no longer in power and AOAV's plea for more transparency is now directed towards a government that has promised to deliver exactly that.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree ... casualties
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