Wednesday, December 9, 2004 Blair Rules Out
Iraq Civilian Death Toll Probe By Lyndsay
Griffiths LONDON (Reuters) - British Prime
Minister Tony Blair rejected a call
Wednesday for an independent inquiry into the
civilian death toll in the U.S.-led war in
Iraq.  David
Irving comments: I WATCHED Blair on television
yesterday, Wednesday, December 9, during
Prime Minister's Question Time in the
House, effortlessly warding off the
Question of one luckless Member of
Parliament in the House about these awful
civilian casualties in Iraq.
His primary answer was
in effect to deny the holocaust that he
and President George W Bush have wrought
in Iraq -- claiming that he preferred to
believe the far lower statistics
obligingly furnished to him by the
Quisling authorities appointed by the new
Iraqi government. I bet that somewhere the
Reichsführer SS Heinrich Himmler and
his hit-men are kicking themselves for not
having thought of that gag themselves.
Blair's second line of
defence was that the Iraqi men, women and
children whom he has killed had it coming
to them -- that if Iraq's civilian
population had just lain back and thought
of Iraq, so to speak, none of this would
have happened to them.
In other words he blamed
Saddam Hussein, and latterly the
Iraqis still vainglorious enough, still
possessed of sufficient brazen effrontery,
to want to resist the enemy occupation of
their country, for the deaths inflicted by
his cruise missiles, napalm, howitzer
shelling, and the other murderous
activities of the "coalition" forces.
At least this time Blair
spared us the sanctimonious drivel about
how he and President Bush were merely
responding to the lawful requests of the
Iraqi government -- that is, the
Government of CIA- and MI6- alumnus Ayad
Allawi, who was (undemocratically)
"appointed prime minister by the United
Nations" as he never fails to remind
us.
In my idle moments,
which are at present few, I sometimes
wonder whether Blair and Geoffrey
Hoon, his ridiculous minister of
defence, are ever haunted by the images of
the children they have killed.
They are serial
child-killers, and the fact that they have
used Britain's proud armed forces to do
their dirty work does not mitigate their
guilt.  At least Marshal of
the Royal Air Force Sir Arthur ("Butcher")
Harris, whom I interviewed forty-two years
ago (above), could offer the
fiction that Germany had started the
killing: not a single Iraqi bomb or shell
has fallen on London or Washington.
I trust that Blair and
Hoon can sleep at night, because, for
God's sake, doing what they have done, I
know that I could not. |
The call came in an open letter to the premier
made available to Reuters and signed by over 40
diplomats, peers, scientists and churchmen.Any totaling of the Iraqi civilian war dead
could embarrass Blair ahead of a general election
expected next May
[2005] in a
country that mostly opposed the U.S.- led war. Britain and the United States have suffered
around 1,070 military losses in the war since it
began in March 2003 but the countrywide casualty
count is not known.
[Website note: this
figure, already a baffling under-estimate, does not
include casualties to the "civilian contractors"
and other coalition forces in Iraq, or the 25,000
seriously injured occupying troops.]
Blair, however, said he saw no need for an
inquiry. "Figures from the Iraqi
Ministry of Health, which are a survey from the
hospitals there, are in our view the most
accurate survey there is," he told
parliament.[Website note:
How absurd. How many Iraqi civilians obligingly
went to hospital before dying?.]
Defense Minister Geoff Hoon, visiting
British troops in the southern Iraqi city of Basra,
stressed that Iraqis themselves were best placed to
get the necessary data. "We want the Iraqi authorities to be in a
position to provide that information so that we can
all have an accurate picture of what is going on,"
he told BBC radio. Iraq's health ministry has said 3,853 civilians
were killed between April and October this year but
critics say the lack of figures for the previous
period makes a full tally imperative. The signatories urged Blair to commission an
urgent probe and keep counting so long as British
soldiers were in Iraq. "Your government is obliged under
international humanitarian law to protect the
civilian population during military operations
in Iraq, and you have consistently promised to
do so," they wrote in the letter."However, without counting the dead and
injured, no one can know whether Britain and its
coalition partners are meeting these
obligations." Signatories included Air Marshal Sir Timothy
Garden, who spent 32 years in the military;
Sir Stephen Egerton, a former British
ambassador to Iraq; human rights campaigner
Bianca Jagger and the Bishop of Oxford
Richard Harris. In a report released in October by the
Lancet medical journal, days before the U.S.
election that returned President Bush to power, a
group of American scientists put civilian deaths at
100,000. But the Iraq Body Count (IBC) -- an
Anglo-American research
group tracking civilian deaths via numerous
sources -- has come up with a much lower figure of
about 14,000-16,000. 
CURRENT
DEATHTOLL IN
IRAQ
and COST
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