'How many Arabs have we killed?'

More recently Aaron Glantz, a senior reporter at Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting, who was an unembedded journalist during the April 2004 siege of Fallujah (a battle in which Australia was involved), gave this account in response to Donald Trump's appointment of James "Mad Dog" Mattis as Defence Secretary:

This was a battle that I covered as an unembedded journalist, where the U.S. Marine Corps killed so many people, so many civilians, that the municipal soccer stadium of that city had to be turned into a graveyard. U.S. Marines there shot at ambulances. They shot at aid workers. They cordoned off the city and prevented civilians from fleeing. Some marines posed for trophy photos with the people that they killed. I remember walking through the city shortly after the Marines pulled out, and there were rotting bodies all over the streets, because during the actual siege, U.S. Marine snipers would shoot at anyone who was outside, so people were afraid to go and bury the dead. Shopping centres were destroyed. And this gets to an important issue of disproportionality …. This whole assault was launched because of the killing of four Blackwater security contractors. And, you know, in response, James Mattis levelled the city.

This correlates with the account provided by Christopher Doran, postdoctoral research associate in political economy at Macquarie University.

In his 2008 article 'The reality of Australia's collateral damage in Iraq', Christopher Doran writes:

General [Jim]Molan's excerpt is a highly sanitised version of what actually occurred under his command. Molan's account suggests that the attack on Fallujah, codenamed Operation Fury, was little more than a few surgical missile strikes which unfortunately and only occasionally resulted in civilian deaths.

He conveniently omits the fact that an estimated 30,000 to 50,000 civilians still remained in Fallujah when the attack began. Citizens had been instructed to evacuate the city, population 250,000, before bombing began in October 2004, but any and all men aged 15 to 45 were prohibited from leaving. Many family members understandably chose to stay with their fathers and brothers. Once the bombing began, all exits out of the city were sealed off.

On October 16, The Washington Post reported that 'electricity and water were cut off to the city just as a fresh wave of [bombing]strikes began Thursday night, an action that U.S. forces also took at the start of assaults on Najaf and Samarra.' The Red Cross and other aid agencies were also denied access to deliver the most basic of humanitarian aid - water, food, and emergency medical supplies to the civilian population.

The situation was so severe that the United Nation's Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, Jean Ziegler, stated that the Coalition had used 'hunger and deprivation of water as a weapon of war against the civilian population [in]flagrant violation' of the Geneva Conventions. Specifically Article 14, which clearly states that cutting off water, electricity, and denying access to humanitarian aid is considered to be a war crime.

But it gets worse, much worse. On November 7, a New York Times front page story detailed how the Coalition's ground campaign was launched by seizing Fallujah's only hospital: 'Patients and hospital employees were rushed out of the rooms by armed soldiers and ordered to sit or lie on the floor while troops tied their hands behind their backs.' The story also revealed the motive for attacking the hospital: 'The offensive also shut down what officers said was a propaganda weapon for the militants: Fallujah General Hospital with its stream of reports of civilian casualties'. The city's two medical clinics were also bombed and destroyed.'

So, not only do some countries involved in these illegal incursions conceal whatever data they may have, others deliberately avoid collecting data and even take active steps to prevent data being collected. If these wars were and are being fought in pursuit of the lofty moral objectives espoused by the invading nations, what possible excuse could they have for burying data relating to what they did and what occurred as a result. No-one can assess the benefits of what is being done when the costs are concealed.

Why hide the extent of the death and injury they inflict on an innocent population? Perhaps the perpetrators feel some semblance of shame or remorse for the innocent lives lost or ruined as a result of their actions? The most likely explanation, however, is that those in power at home foresee the extent of public outrage they would face if the facts were made known and, particularly, if they were illustrated by photos or videos of what lies behind cold and depersonalised statistics.

The United States has already experienced that; any public support for the Vietnam war was lost overnight with the publication of the photograph of the napalmed girl running naked down the road and a similar public reaction would follow similar publications today. But a complete lack of any real information – from the general to the particular – obviates the risk of that happening.