Under-counting the dead
“A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of
social uplift is approaching spiritual death.“ -- Reverend Martin Luther King
"And you yourself would mutter when
You took the things that once were men,
And sped them through that zone of hate
To where the dripping surgeons wait;
And wonder too if in God's sight
War ever, ever can be right."
– Robert Service, military ambulance driver
“Actually it's quite fun to fight them, you know. It's a hell of a hoot," Mattis said, prompting laughter from some military
members in the audience. "It's fun to shoot some people. I'll be right up there with you. I like brawling. " -- Lt. Gen. James Mattis,
a three star Marine general and commander of US Marine expeditions during two wars for oil [CNN (1); DoD transcripts(2)],
later appointed top Marine General at U.S. Central Command
Various wars for oil have seen military operations in Nigeria, Venezuela, Afghanistan (home of the pipeline from Iraq), Suez, the Bospherous, Uzbekistan, Iraq, Somalia, Georgia, to mention merely the better known venues. There have, of course, been others.
The ethical pros or cons of these wars for oil (or perhaps better called, invasions for oil) is for history to judge. Although already as you may know, numerous war crimes tribunals have found those who began and perpetuated the oil wars guilty of well documented and researched war crimes, particularly as related to the Nuremberg rules. As the original Nuremberg trials showed so clearly, torture, burning hundreds of thousands of people alive (whether with napalm, white phosphorous, or thermobaric weapons), or depositing depleted uranium (acute myeloid leukemia inducing), and similar atrocities are crimes against humanity. The data and findings of the better known tribunals may be had from: [Bhagwat; Santino; Penketh; Byrne; Foulkrod; Yuen; Russel(1); Clark; Jury; Russel(2); Grey(1,2); Parker] as well as many others]. Sadly these reports are not well known in the countries perpetrating said wars, although they are very well known in the rest of the world.
At any rate, one of the well substantiated findings has been that millions have died in these oil war/invasions, which began in earnest in the early 1950's. By way of illustration, consider perhaps the best known of these wars: In the early stages of invasion on obviously trumped up grounds, more than 654,000 civilian deaths occurred [Burnham; Lancet]. But as the war continued, ever more and more civilians were killed by the invaders. Using a different methodology than these earlier studies ORB found that over one million humans had been killed by the invasion [Baker]. Just Foreign Policy in an update [JFP(1((2); OR(1)] to the John Hopkins study estimated at least 1.3 million civilian deaths at the hands of the invaders. However since these numbers excluded areas where the vast majority of causalities occurred [ibid], the actual numbers are thought to be substantially greater [see particularly reports from Reporters sans Frontières and Amnesty International]. These estimates - depending upon source are double to triple the ORB numbers if civilians who have been maimed for life are included.
Additionally there were a multitude of disposessed peoples - refugees fleeing the slaughter. Statistics gathered by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees [UNHCR(1,2,3,4)], particularly [UNHCR(2)], indicated at least 4.7 million refugees. Hence when this is augmented by the numbers of maimed and dead, there may have been as many as 6,000,000 persons either killed outright or displaced to other countries as fleeing refugees - a holocaust of mamoth proportions. (See also [Polya] and [UNICEF(1)] - studies which find even these numbers lower than actual.)
“We have brought torture, cluster bombs, depleted uranium, innumerable acts of random murder,
misery, degradation and death ... and call it 'bringing freedom and democracy ...'.
-- H. Pinter, acceptance speech for his Nobel Prize
Following US President Truman's order to drop the atomic bomb upon Hiroshima and Nagasaki after [Ogino] Japan had surendered, US authorities seized and suppressed film shot in the bombed cities [Aferson] so the the public never knew or understood the extent of the civilian deaths. Only later, after considerable research by historians around the world was the true extent of civilian death made known: In the first nine seconds following the bombings, 700,000 people were vaporized. Over the following years several million more innocent civilians died prematurely from cancers caused by the bombings. Western governments deployed considerable effort to hide this, even using the Jason groups to strategize censorship methods. No photographs, films, or body counts were allowed into any mass media [Kogawa]. The US Secretary of Defence at that time went so far as to deny any knowledge of the extent of death and disease [Snow]. He claimed that the military did not count the dead. A statement which a Pentagon report two years later proved this statement to be like so many made by those involved, false [Monbiot]. Similarly during the Vietnam war, the number of civilian deaths at the hands of the invaders was in the millions [AFP; Smith], yet at the time the invading government insisted, repeatedly, that only a handful of persons were killed. The perpetrators of the wars/invasions for oil mentioned above also followed these well estabilish methods of censorship, masking the realities of slaughter from the taxpayers who funded it.
Again, history will decide the merits here. I merely wish to point out that in all wars, perhaps particularly wars/invasions for oil, the numbers of civilian dead are always vastly understated by the invading governments. In a media owned and operated by the same barons who perpetrated whatever war is currently to their fiscal advantage, this is perhaps no surprise. Very sad. Almost all wars despite the egregious propaganda to the contrary , are for the enrichment of these barons. As the most highly decorated military officer in U.S. history summed up so well:
``I have spent 33 years ... being a high class muscle man for Big Business... In short, I was a racketeer
for capitalism.... I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers ...I helped rape half a dozen
Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street.... I helped see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested....
I was rewarded with honors, medals, and promotions." [Evan(3)] -- U.S. Major General Butler,
recipient of two Medals of Honour and the most highly decorated military officer in U.S. history