Lee Salter
Wars
and invasions undertaken by "democratic" states are supposed
to be
subject to the will of the public. Now obviously, this does not mean that
the public decides when to go to war or invade, but unfortunately that
governments and armies spend hundreds of millions of dollars each year
to
convince their publics to allow them to kill and bomb others. The UK
Foreign Office Public Diplomacy Operation spends around 3300,000,000 per
year, and the US State Department's Office of Public Diplomacy spends
around $600,000,000 to convince us that they need to take taxes in order
to secure more efficient methods of slaughter. The public gets tricked.
Perhaps
a more subtle "trick" on the public relates to casualty figures.
For the following, please try to fill in the gaps yourself. We were told
that if the invasion of Iraq resulted in the deaths of over 1000 US
soldiers (strangely including precisely 0 children of government members
or others who voted for the war), then question would be asked as to
whether this is second Vietnam. This has happened and questions are being
asked. However, among several very clear differences between Vietnam and
Iraq is one of import for the question in hand: body armour. Today, US
soldiers have such sophisticated body armour that casualty figures are
accordingly low. Philip Brandler of the Army?s Natick Soldier Center said
of the army's body armour:
"We
have had enumerable instances of [warfighters] taking hits to the
body, being hit in the body armor, being knocked down - and then getting
right back up again and returning the fire,"
So,
if, based on the number of US deaths, we are to consider the resistance
to occupation in Iraq to be tame or "localised" around a few
"fundamentali
st terrorist rag heads", then we would be sadly mistaken. In fact,
as we
know, the US military has been at pains to prevent reporting of non-fatal
casualties, which would swell the casualty figures significantly. Even
a
conservative Department of Defense figure puts the number of wounded at
6000 (http://icasualties.org/oif/),
and perhaps to double this figure
would not been too outrageous. So what does this tell us? Well, the most
simple thing to do is to imagine how this would look without body armour
-
7,000 dead, 10,000 dead, 20,000 dead? How would the resistance to the
occupation be seen with these figures instead? The fact of the matter
is
that if we were to judge the situation by the number of casualties as
a
whole (rather than just the dead), then perhaps Bush and his war-profiteer
friends would not have the dwindling public support that they currently
have? On the other side, if the actual deaths reflected the ferocity of
the resistance, then the latter would be considered very differently.
Perhaps if the Iraqi resistance were clad in such armour and the invading
coalition were clothed in jeans and t-shirts, ideas of the competence
of
soldiers on either side would be reversed. Body armour is obviously not
a
tactic to pull the wool over our eyes, but it does serve to cloud the
hell
of war a great deal.
Perhaps
this piece will be met with resigned signs of "its war, stupid",
but my point is not that the invading forces should strip off to
allow
fair play! The point of this is that we should not be misled by
government
and military propaganda (as they used to call it, or "public
relations" as
we call it today) about true casualty figures or as to the nature
of the
resistance in Iraq.