[Peace-discuss] Attention must be paid

[C. G. Estabrook]

[The following comparison between the tsunami and American destruction in
Iraq -- and what the media made of it -- is from the British group
MediaLens.org.  --CGE]

... the admirable outpouring of media and public compassion for the
victims of Asia's natural disaster makes the near-total indifference to
the suffering of Iraqi civilians under Western attack even more stunning.
Who would believe, looking at the images of devastation from Indonesia,
Sri Lanka and Thailand, that Britain and the United States are responsible
for bringing a comparable disaster to a single country, Iraq? While the US
government has so far pledged USD350m to the victims of the tsunami, and
the UK government BP50m, the US has spent USD200 billion on the Iraq war
and the UK £BP6bn.

Simon Jenkins writes in The Times:

"To me the greatest disaster of 2004 was not the Indonesian tsunami but
the continuing conflict in Iraq, the bloody endgame of the 9/11 disaster.
The upper estimate of deaths in Iraq, 100,000, is eerily similar to that
for the tsunami.

"While the one disaster rates as an act of God and the other an act of
man, to whit the President of the United States, to the hapless Iraqis the
difference must seem notional. They must feel as impotent in the face of
falling bombs and the continuing tidal wave of destruction. The bodies of
their loved ones must seem just as dead"...

But Jenkins is wrong -- the upper estimate for deaths made in the only
serious scientific study to date is 194,000. Professor Richard Garfield --
one of the authors of a report conducted by the John Hopkins Bloomberg
School of Public Health on Iraqi casualties published in the Lancet
science journal -- has said: "The true death toll is far more likely to be
on the high-side of our point estimate [98,000] than on the low side."
(Email sent to Media Lens reader, October 31, 2004)

And yet our search of the LexisNexis media database in early January
showed that the words "The Lancet" and "John Hopkins Bloomberg School" had
been mentioned a total of just 23 times in all UK newspapers since the
report was published on October 29, 2004. The words "The Lancet" and
"Iraq" had been mentioned 127 times. By contrast the words "tsunami" and
"Asia" were mentioned in 700 newspaper articles in just three days in
early January. The total since December 26 overwhelms the counting
capacity of LexisNexis but certainly runs into many thousands.

In responding to the question of why the BBC has focused so heavily on
numbers of dead in Asia, but not in Iraq, director of news, Helen Boaden,
wrote to one Media Lens reader:

"I think the real problem is that the estimates of Iraqi civilian dead are
so divergent and so open to challenge that we find it very hard to quote
them in brief news items. Clearly establishing exact numbers for the
tsunami is also almost impossible but there are government estimates which
are being regularly updated and are not being challenged in the same way."
(Email forwarded to Media Lens, January 10, 2005)

This is a classic example of media servility to power. For journalists
like Boaden, estimates are lent credibility precisely because they are
government estimates, whereas non-government estimates (especially those
subject to government attack) are viewed as lacking in comparable
credibility. The Lancet study was published by one of the most highly
respected scientific journals in the world. But if cynical vested
interests launch crass and baseless attacks, these are sufficient to make
the findings "so open to challenge."

To be fair, the logic is at least consistent – if authority is the final
arbiter of right and wrong, then it is only right that common sense and
rational thought be discarded in deference to the same authority.

It is worth considering that every time we see the swathes of destruction
from Aceh in Indonesia that these images are comparable to the scenes of
utter devastation that we are +not+ being shown from Iraq. And yet, as
Jenkins points out, the slaughter in Iraq is even more appalling, even
more worthy of our horror and compassion, for the simple reason that it
was entirely man-made, entirely avoidable. US secretary of state, Colin
Powell, declared of the tsunami disaster zone:

"I've been in war and I've been through a number of hurricanes, tornadoes
and other relief operations, but I've never seen anything like this."
(www.usatoday.com/news/world/2005-01-05-powell_x.htm, January 9, 2005)

With Fallujah fresh in everyone's minds, the media failed to make the
obvious point. Iraqi doctor Ali Fadhil, however, reports from the
shattered city:

"By 10am we were inside the city. It was completely devastated,
destruction everywhere. It looked like a city of ghosts. Falluja used to
be a modern city; now there was nothing. We spent the day going through
the rubble that had been the centre of the city; I didn't see a single
building that was functioning." (Fadhil, "City of ghosts," The Guardian,
January 11, 2005)

This was done by human beings, illegally, in contravention of the Geneva
convention. Perhaps Powell had forgotten about Fallujah. Perhaps the media
had, too...

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