https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qO-sO0tV9fE
Your Watchman believes the Middle East has been de-stabilized by the U.S., Israel, Saudi Arabia and their Sunni allies. I would speculate it was predominantly Shia troops who ravaged Sunni Mosul in their effort to eradicate Sunni ISIS and al Qaeda.
Nicolas J S Davies is the author of Blood On Our Hands: the American Invasion and Destruction of Iraq and he wrote the following article.
Iraqi Kurdish military
intelligence reports have estimated that the nine-month-long U.S.-Iraqi siege
and bombardment of Mosul to oust Islamic State forces killed 40,000
civilians. This is the most realistic estimate so far of the
civilian death toll in Mosul.
But even this is likely to be an
underestimate of the true number of civilians killed. No serious,
objective study has been conducted to count the dead in Mosul, and studies
in other war zones have invariably found numbers of dead that exceeded previous
estimates by as much as 20 to one, as a United Nations-backed Truth Commission
did in Guatemala
after the end of its civil war. In Iraq, epidemiological
studies in 2004 and 2006 revealed a post-invasion
death toll that was about 12 times higher than previous
estimates.
The bombardment of Mosul
included tens of
thousands of bombs and missiles dropped by U.S. and “coalition”
warplanes, thousands of 220-pound
HiMARS rockets fired by U.S. Marines from their “Rocket City”
base at Quayara, and tens or hundreds of thousands of 155-mm and
122-mm howitzer shells fired by U.S., French and Iraqi
artillery.
This nine-month bombardment left
much of Mosul in ruins (as seen here),
so the scale of slaughter among the civilian population should not be a
surprise to anybody. But the revelation of the Kurdish intelligence
reports by former Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari in an interview
with Patrick Cockburn of the U.K.’s Independent newspaper
makes it clear that allied intelligence agencies were well aware of the scale of
civilian casualties throughout this brutal campaign.
The Kurdish intelligence reports
raise serious questions about the U.S. military’s own statements regarding
civilian deaths in its bombing of Iraq and Syria since 2014. As recently
as April 30, 2017, the U.S. military publicly estimated the total number of
civilian deaths caused by all of the 79,992
bombs and missiles it had dropped on Iraq and Syria since 2014
only as “at least
352.” On June 2, it only slightly revised its absurd estimate
to “at least
484.”
The “discrepancy” – multiply by
almost 100 – in the civilian death toll between the Kurdish military
intelligence reports and the U.S. military’s public statements can hardly be a
question of interpretation or good-faith disagreement among allies. The
numbers confirm that, as independent analysts have suspected, the U.S. military
has conducted a deliberate campaign to publicly underestimate the number of
civilians it has killed in its bombing campaign in Iraq and Syria.
Propaganda Campaign
The only rational purpose for
such an extensive propaganda campaign by U.S. military authorities is to
minimize the public reaction inside the United States and Europe to the killing
of tens of thousands of civilians so that U.S. and allied forces can keep
bombing and killing without political hindrance or accountability.
It would be naive to believe that
the corrupt institutions of government in the United States or the subservient
U.S. "lame stream presstitute media" will take serious steps to investigate the true number of
civilians killed in Mosul. But it is important that global civil society
come to terms with the reality of the destruction of Mosul and the slaughter of
its people. The U.N. and governments around the world should hold the
United States accountable for its actions and take firm action to stop the
slaughter of civilians in Raqqa, Tal Afar, Hawija and wherever the
U.S-led bombing campaign continues unabated.
The U.S.
propaganda campaign to pretend that its aggressive military
operations are not killing hundreds of thousands of civilians began well before
the assault on Mosul. In fact, while the U.S. military has failed to
decisively defeat resistance forces in any of the countries it has attacked or
invaded since 2001, its failures on the battlefield have been offset by
remarkable success in a domestic propaganda campaign that has left the American
public in near-total ignorance of the death and destruction U.S. armed forces
have wreaked in at least seven countries (Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Syria,
Yemen, Somalia and Libya).
In 2015, Physicians for Social
Responsibility (PSR) co-published a report titled, “Body Count: Casualty
Figures After 10 Years of the ‘War On Terror’.” This
97-page report examined publicly available efforts to count the dead in Iraq,
Afghanistan and Pakistan, and concluded that about 1.3 million people had been
killed in those three countries alone.
I will examine the PSR study in
more detail in a moment, but its figure of 1.3 million dead in just three
countries stands in striking contrast to what U.S. officials and corporate
media have told the American public about the ever-expanding global war being
fought in our name.
After examining the various
estimates of war deaths in Iraq, the authors of Body Count concluded
that the
epidemiological study headed by Gilbert Burnham of Johns
Hopkins School of Public Health in 2006 was the most thorough and
reliable. But just a few months after that study found that about 600,000
Iraqis had probably been killed in the three years since the U.S.-led invasion, a poll that asked a thousand Americans to estimate how many
Iraqis had been killed yielded a median response of only 9,890.
So, once again, we find a vast
discrepancy – multiply by about 60 – between what the public was led to believe
and a serious estimate of the numbers of people killed. While the U.S.
military has meticulously counted and identified its own casualties in these
wars, it has worked hard to keep the U.S. public in the dark about how many
people have been killed in the countries it has attacked or invaded.
This enables U.S. political and
military leaders to maintain the fiction that we are fighting these wars in
other countries for the benefit of their people, as opposed to killing
millions of them, bombing their cities to rubble, and plunging country
after country into intractable violence and chaos for which our morally
bankrupt leaders have no solution, military or otherwise.
(After the Burnham study was
released in 2006, the Western mainstream media spent more time and space
tearing the study down than was ever spent trying to ascertain a realistic
number of Iraqis who had died because of the invasion.)
Misguided Weapons
As the U.S. unleashed its “shock
and awe” bombardment of Iraq in 2003, one intrepid AP reporter spoke to
Rob Hewson, the editor of Jane’s Air-Launched Weapons, an
international arms trade journal, who actually understood what “air-launched
weapons” are designed to do. Hewson estimated that 20-25 percent
of the latest U.S. “precision” weapons were missing
their targets, killing random people and destroying random buildings across
Iraq.
The Pentagon eventually divulged
that a third of
the bombs dropped on Iraq were not “precision weapons” in the
first place, so altogether about half of the bombs exploding in Iraq were
either just good old-fashioned carpet bombing or “precision” weapons
often missing their targets.
As Rob Hewson said, “In a
war that’s being fought for the benefit of the Iraqi people, you can’t afford
to kill any of them. But you can’t drop bombs and not kill
people. There’s a real dichotomy in all of this.”
Fourteen years later, this
dichotomy persists throughout U.S. military operations around the world. Behind
euphemistic terms like “regime change” and “humanitarian intervention,” the
aggressive U.S.-led use of force has destroyed whatever order existed in at
least six countries and large parts of several more, leaving them
mired in intractable violence and chaos.
In each of these countries, the
U.S. military is now fighting irregular forces that operate among civilian
populations, making it impossible to target these militants or militiamen
without killing large numbers of civilians. But of course, killing
civilians only drives more of the survivors to join the fight against Western
outsiders, ensuring that this now global asymmetric war keeps
spreading and escalating.
Body Count’s estimate of 1.3 million dead, which put the
total death toll in Iraq at about 1 million, was based on several epidemiological
studies conducted there. But the authors emphasized that no such studies had
been conducted in Afghanistan or Pakistan, and so its estimates for those
countries were based on fragmentary, less reliable reports compiled by human
rights groups, the Afghan and Pakistani governments and the U.N. Assistance
Mission to Afghanistan. So Body Count‘s conservative estimate
of 300,000 people killed in Afghanistan and Pakistan could well be only a
fraction of the real number of people killed in those countries since 2001.
Hundreds of thousands more people
have been killed in Syria, Yemen, Somalia, Libya, Palestine, the Philippines,
Ukraine, Mali and other countries swept up in this ever-expanding Global War On Terrorism (GWOT), along with Western victims of terrorist crimes from San Bernardino to
Barcelona and Turku. Thus, it is probably no exaggeration to say that the wars
the U.S. has waged since 2001 have killed at least two million people, and that
the bloodshed is neither contained nor diminishing.
How will we, the American people,
in whose name all these wars are being fought, hold both ourselves and our
political and military leaders accountable for this mass destruction of mostly
innocent human life? And how will we hold our military leaders and "lame stream presstitute media" accountable for the insidious propaganda campaign that permits
rivers of human blood to keep flowing unreported and
unchecked through the shadows of our vaunted but
illusory “information society”?
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