Iraq, War and WikiLeaks:

The Real Story

08 November 2010 - The tranche of American military documents released by the WikiLeaks project contain a wealth of detail about the coalition's indifference to civilian life. But they also tell a deeper story of “how” war has killed in Iraq.

The publication of a huge tranche of United States military-communications records in Iraq by the WikiLeaks project on 22 October 2010 has rightly been greeted as a major event. The 392,000 documents in the so-called "Iraq war logs" provide a wealth of information about the realities of the years since the war was launched in March 2003. The result is to promise a significant shift in understandings and perceptions of the war.

The logs come too late to ignite political upheaval in the two countries which were in the vanguard of the invasion. The United States has a president whose election owed much to his criticism from the war; the United Kingdom has a deputy prime minister (Nick Clegg) who calls it "illegal", and even the new leader of the country's Labour Party (Ed Miliband) says the war was "wrong".

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At this stage, then, the war logs provide more comprehensive reasons to regard the Iraq war as variously wrong, illegal, or just plain disastrous. The aggression by the United States and Britain was in strict terms unnecessary, since Saddam Hussein lacked "weapons of mass destruction"; and illegitimate, since the United Nations Security Council had declined to authorise force against his regime.

But is now confirmed that the methods adopted by the leading coalition allies inflicted needless and avoidable civilian deaths (see Michel Thieren, "Deaths in Iraq: how many, and why it matters" [18 October 2006] and "Deaths in Iraq: the numbers game, revisited" [11 January 2008]).. More broadly, the US-UK invasion provoked a cycle of devastating events: a prolonged war that combined resistance against the occupiers, conflict among armed militia involving the US-backed Iraqi regime, genocidal violence from several sides against different sections of the civilian population and thus in turn mass displacement.

America and Britain must take direct responsibility for the initial aggression that exposed Iraqi society to the risk of a murderous civil war, and for their own civilian-killing methods of fighting. At the same time, 2003 is the only year of war (according to the IBC's pre-logs estimates) that the coalition directly caused the majority of civilian deaths; and in each year since 2005, such casualties have been fewer than 10% of the total. This is not nearly the full extent of the coalition's responsibility, however; the war logs underline how complicit the US was in the worst features of the continuing war, including often close-up permission of extensive torture and killing by their Iraqi allies. {read rest, with a number of backlinks}