The good, the bad and the innocent -Aug 30, 2005

by Jan Benvie

On a recent trip north I happened to be in a queue of traffic at a checkpoint outside Mosul when a suicide car bomb exploded some meters ahead of us.

A short time later a U.S. soldier, with whom I was talking at the bomb site, asked me "Does anyone, other than the bad guys, know you are coming?"

He saw the state of affairs in Iraq as a good guy/bad guy situation - the U.S. of course being the "good guys."

Earlier that day I had spoken with the second in command of the Wolf Brigade (one of the Ministry of Interior's special forces). This dialogue revealed that he too viewed affairs here as a good guy/bad guy situation. For him, bombing a town was simply getting rid of terrorists; all the inhabitants were "bad guys."

This good guy/bad guy mentality also permeates the higher echelons of government. Donald Rumsfeld, U.S. Secretary of Defense, before the November 2004 bombing of Fallujah said "Innocent civilians in [Fallujah] have all the guidance they need as to how they can avoid getting into trouble." (9 November 2004.)

In his mind anyone left in the city was a "bad guy."

The targeting of foreigners in Iraq, or anyone associated with them, is yet another example of this over simplification: foreigners equals bad. Similarly, militants target people because they are Christian (unbelievers) or because they are Sunni or Shi'a (not true believers) -- believer/unbeliever being the religious extremist's good guy/bad guy.

Hollywood films, video and computer games not only encourage this simplistic view of war, they also promote the idea that is acceptable to kill the "bad guys" --subliminally desensitising people to killing.

Warfare has changed significantly over the last 100 years. The battlefields are now the towns and cities in which people live. The Peace Pledge Union estimates that throughout the 18th, 19th and much of the 20th centuries civilians accounted for 50% of war casualties. From the 1960s this steadily rose. By the end of the last century PPU estimates that 95% of those killed in war were civilians.

Indifferent governments wage war, but refuse to count the civilian dead.

There are no official figures for civilian casualties in Iraq, but estimates vary from the 26,000 of Iraq Body Count, to the 100,000 published in the Lancet medical journal, in October 2004.

Military deaths, on the other hand, are well documented. A total of 2,047 Multinational Forces (MNF) have been killed,
and there have been 4,922 Iraqi police/military deaths.

I know of no accurate accounts of Iraqi military forces killed between March and May 2003.

Even if there are good guys and bad guys--a concept in which I do not believe--clearly, most of those killed are neither.

The majority are the forgotten "innocent guys."

Christian Peacemaker Teams is an initiative of the historic peace churches (Mennonites, Church of the Brethren, and Quakers) with support and membership from a range of Catholic and Protestant denominations. Supporting violence-reduction efforts around the world is its mandate.

Article reproduced with the kind permission of Christian Peacemaker Teams