Goldberg vs. Greenwald

Corporal Jeffery Goldberg is pissed.

See, on his Salon blog, Glenn Greenwald wrote a scathing critique of Goldberg through the lens of the Dave Weigel-Washington Post affair. The post, on how Goldberg’s rush to judge Weigel is emblematic of flaws throughout his writing, got a lot of coverage (as catalogued by Mondoweiss).

So Goldberg took to his Atlantic blog defending his reporting by citing his most notorious achievement: the Iraq War.

While Greenwald makes many excellent points about peculiar brand of journalism practiced by Goldberg (the Mideast reporter who, despite being an IDF veteran, decries everyone else as “partisans”), he does return to the Iraq War. Curiously, Goldberg, recounting a recent e-mail exchange with an Iraqi pol, runs through justifications for the 2003 invasion — though he insistently refers to it as his “early support for the Iraq war” [my emphasis]. He extends an invite from his e-mail buddy, Iraqi Kurdistan PM Barham Salih, to visit and talk to everyone in Iraq who supported the U.S. invasion:

If [Greenwald] were to meet with representatives of the Kurds — who make up 20 percent of the population of Iraq and who were the most oppressed group in Iraq during the period of Saddam’s rule (experiencing not only a genocide but widespread chemical gassing) — I think it might be possible for him to understand why some people — even some Iraqis — supported the overthrow of Saddam. […] I could also arrange a visit to Najaf or the equivalent, where Greenwald could meet with representatives of the Shi’a, who also took it on the chin from Saddam.

Yes, Corporal Goldberg, Glenn Greenwald could very well travel to Iraq with you and meet all types of people there who supported the war. But there are at least 600,000 Iraqis who, I imagine, are not too thrilled about the way it all turned out and with whom Greenwald will never get a meeting.

One could also dredge up some Iranians — from within and without Iran and, yes, of all political stripes, classes, ethnic groups, and religious affiliations — who might support a U.S. invasion of the Islamic Republic. Does that mean that Goldberg is also ready to lend “early support” to that war?

Ali Gharib

Ali Gharib is a New York-based journalist on U.S. foreign policy with a focus on the Middle East and Central Asia. His work has appeared at Inter Press Service, where he was the Deputy Washington Bureau Chief; the Buffalo Beast; Huffington Post; Mondoweiss; Right Web; and Alternet. He holds a Master's degree in Philosophy and Public Policy from the London School of Economics and Political Science. A proud Iranian-American and fluent Farsi speaker, Ali was born in California and raised in D.C.

SHOW 31 COMMENTS

31 Comments

  1. Jon, we’re closer, although (unlike you) I haven’t made assumptions about how your brain works, simply because we disagree.

    To wit: Greenwald mentioned, in passing, that “hundreds of thousands” had died as a result of the US invasion, and, as you originally wrote, “Gharib [stated] In This Piece That 600,000 Iraqi Civilians Have Died Since The 2003 Invasion?”

    Well you have now added a caveat: deaths by direct violence, which must of course be lower, as the set of those directly killed is smaller than the set of those directly and indirectly killed.

    But that’s not what Greenwald/Gharib were talking about. Like most rational people, they calculate the damage of a war not simply by how many got a bullet to the head, but how many died because of the war. If you starve, or die of a preventable disease, or die of thirst, or contaminated water, after your country is bombed/invaded/occupied, it is from the war. That’s why it is an epidemiological question: how does the death rate after the invasion compare to that before? And when we ask that, we get figures in the hundreds of thousands.

    We can look on Wiki and ask — how many Russians died in WWII? How many Vietnamese died after the US invaded? We’ll get numbers in the millions and tens of millions. Not because every Russian got a German bullet, or every Vietnamese got a bomb dropped on their village, but because the casualties of war are mostly civilian, and mostly indirect. Controversial? Not a bit.

    This is completely analogous to Haiti: the number who died instantly, when their building collapsed on them or the bridge fell, is much smaller than those who died in the days and weeks later, due to starvation, lack of water, infection, etc. Did the latter die because of the earthquake? Of course.

    Originally you objected to the idea that 600 K civilians had died since 2003; now you say what you meant is died from direct violence. All of the surveys, if we take the time to actually read them, get into these distinctions. But your original claim, that the 600K number is ” Totally Unsupported By Facts” is clearly wrong, as all of the studies (by the Iraq Health folks, but two different sets of western public health researchers, and by ORB) have found. It is actually the number caused by direct violence that is harder to estimate, because of the occupiers’ direct interest in hiding the evidence. GIs may dig their bullets out of women they’ve murdered, but only because that is easier than re-hydrating dead children after we have bombed the water system.

    I’m not sure what is the political rationale for dismissing as ludicrous high numbers of civilian deaths as a result of aggressive war. The numbers are real, based on the best research methods available, as the warmongers privately admit. To minimize civilian deaths caused by our own government’s criminal violence seems, at best, confused.

  2. OK, let me take one more very brief stab at this to see if I can clear up any misunderstanding.

    When Gharib wrote the figure 600,000, I took him to mean deaths by violence — in combat, in bombings, terrorist acts, friendly fire, accidental shootings, etc. I made that assumption because there’s no way to accurately determine how many Iraqis have “died as a result of the US occupation.” The very fact that the ORB survey came up with a number between 700,000 and 1.4 million says as much: if one can’t pin the numbers down any better than that (for the study is saying that it might this many deaths, but then again it might be DOUBLE that number), then clearly the data you’re working with is of poor quality to say the least.

    Now the question of refugees has been entered into the equation. I certainly am not denying that Iraq had been largely wrecked by the war, and the lives of millions of Iraqis severely disrupted. That’s obvious. The only point I am trying to make is that the best evidence we have shows that deaths by violence since 2003 are in the 100-200,000 range. How many more people have died “as a result of the US ocupation” can only be estimated in very rough terms, and the totals arrived at will depend in large part on how one defines those terms. And how one defines terms is at least to an extent influenced by one’s world view, prejudices, etc. Even the most competent, “objective” observers will bring these to the table. The highly controversial nature of the war only exacerbates this problem. Combine this with the wretched state of affairs on the ground, which makes obtaining good data on something as amorphous as “deaths caused by the US occupation” extremely difficult, and you wind doing little more than playing a guessing game.

  3. Your argument seems completely disconnected with the actual facts of the situation. From WIKI:

    Participants of the ORB survey were asked the following question:
    “How many members of your household, if any, have died as a result of the conflict in Iraq since 2003 (ie as a result of violence rather than a natural death such as old age)? Please note that I mean those who were actually living under your roof.”

    From the poll margin of error of +/-2.5% ORB calculated a range of 733,158 to 1,446,063 deaths. =

    On 28 January 2008, ORB published an update based on additional work carried out in rural areas of Iraq. Some 600 additional interviews were undertaken September 20 to 24, 2007. As a result of this the death estimate was revised to 1,033,000 with a given range of 946,000 to 1,120,000.”

    So according to the largest ongoing poll of Iraqis, the number of civilians who died violently since the US invaded is about a million, give or take. According to Iraqis and those who actually investigated the situation.

    Greenwald and Gharib undercounted; and you objected, based on nothing more than the ASSERTION, without evidence, that the number is smaller. You are entitled to your opinion, but not your own set of facts. You wrote: “The Bottom Line Is That There Is No Evidence To Support The Figure Of 600,000 Or More Violent Deaths In The Period 2003-2010. That Is The Only Fact I Am Asserting.” In plain language, you are wrong: such numbers are based on the best understanding of the situation. If we take “evidence” to mean something like — factual data collected in a systematic way. In fact, all of the factual data collected in systematic ways directly contradicts your assertion. I wonder: what evidence do you bring to the table for your number? What evidence would you look for to check if your number was wrong?

    As for the question about “Deaths Caused By The US Occupation”: I cannot tell from your answer that you understand the concept of epidemiology, which asks EXACTLY those questions. How many people have died worldwide from AIDS? How many died in the Tsunami? No one counts dead bodies and arrives at a number: people do surveys, and work the data. Perforce the answers include large ranges and margins of errors. But that is quite different from making a “guess”. Or, as in your case, fixating on on number that is made up whole cloth, and ignoring the substantial evidence that reality is an order of magnitude worse.

  4. Jon, how would you account for bombings of infrastructure that would violate Nuremburg standards? I know workers in these countries who love to slur the Arab for the general disrepair of their industry. I’ve yet to see one admit that we caused a bit of it.

    I don’t know what the facts are, but I am fairly sure that the embargoes (acts of war) might have some effect on the way they’ve maintained their sewage systems.

    Despite this, Iraqis had electricity working for 23hrs plus in Bagdad. I know this not based on reports but the people there. The very choice on the timing of the War was mendacious. No sensible person in Texas would take out the electricity in cities in Summer, (I’m VERY reluctant to even plant a tree with full irrigation!) Heat Kills! We destroyed the electricity and water service for the equivalent of Mexico City, Rome, London, New York through a Texas Summer. Here our low might be 80. It’s 90 at midnight and just a 100 during the day. That is Murder under Nuremburg–how do we count those Jon?

  5. I’m suggesting Bagdad is equivalent to one of those cities, not all of them together.

    I really don’t know, Summer is a time where I would never go camping around here, though I do it in the other 3 seasons. I hear up North this is actually a great time to picnic and play outside. Here only kids and those of us who work outside do that. I don’t do any voluntary outdoor activities–though Winter is awesome, maybe 2 days of snow, less than a week of days below 32. Went to Big Bend and camped on the mountains over New Years. But, Summer ain’t nothing to play with.

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