On June 6, Jeremy Scahill appeared on Real Time With Bill Maher and stated that a million Iraqi civilians have been killed in Iraq. Maher was correct to greet the figure with skepticism.
Scahill based his remarks on a much-discussed Johns Hopkins study published in The Lancet in 2006. The methodology of the study was promptly discredited by Iraq Body Count, a reputable antiwar source. I touched on the matter long ago, in posts here and here.
Scahill wrote a book on Blackwater, a hot topic, and so has managed to gain some level of mainstream recognition. But his Rebel Reports site shows him to be an ideologue of the extreme left, a fellow traveler of Counterpunch and Socialist Worker, with no credible claim to intellectual honesty.
The Lancet study, for instance, established one important qualitative fact: The clear majority of Iraqi civilians have died at the hands of sectarian militias and criminals, not the U.S. military. This is not to defend the Bush administration’s war, nor to paper over casualties caused by American forces, nor to deny that the U.S. is responsible for setting these horrible events in motion. Far from it. But if Scahill is going to keep citing the Lancet study, he really ought to reveal what it actually shows. Instead, he indulges in a kind of inverse Cheneyism, rewriting the history of the war to suit his ideological purposes, and in so doing, letting some really vile murderers off the hook by erasing their role from the narrative. Someone who truly cares about Iraqi civilian life doesn’t do this.
Meanwhile, Scahill’s response to the current Iranian crisis has been to voice withering disdain for U.S. liberals who have shown solidarity with the protesters. In the headline of one recent post, he asks, “How About a New FB/Twitter App for Victims of US Warcrimes [sic]?” He mockingly wonders when we liberals will show “solidarity with all of the Afghans and Iraqis and Pakistanis being killed by US wars today….”
As I’ve outlined, Scahill has no grounds to lecture anyone about solidarity with Iraqi civilians. On AfPak, it’s little surprise to find Scahill playing exactly the same game, failing to report that a clear majority of Afghan civilian deaths, according to the UN, have been caused by the Taliban and its allies. Rather than direct at least some of his moral outrage against the Taliban — which, unlike the U.S. military, murders and torments innocent Afghans and Pakistanis deliberately, with cold calculation — Scahill poses a false moral equivalence between the Obama administration and the Iranian regime. Of course he doesn’t note that Afghan civilian casualties have prompted a rewrite of U.S. policy on air strikes. And to the hundreds of Iranian activists and journalists and politicians being rounded up and detained right now by the decree of the mullahs? Scahill has offered not a word of support or sympathy.
Iraqis, meanwhile, continue to be slaughtered by the scores, via car bombs and suicide bombs in places specifically chosen to bring about maximum possible harm to the innocent. With U.S. forces slated to withdraw from major Iraqi cities in a matter of days — a necessary and overdue step — there is a chance of a (hopefully) short-term increase in the violence. If and when it happens, Scahill is not one of the “reporters” we should turn to for insight.
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