Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed is the author of “Behind the War on Terror: Western Secret Strategy and the Struggle for Iraq” (New Society, 2003) and executive director of the Institute for Policy Research & Development (www.globalcrisis.org.uk) in London. He teaches globalisation, empire and international relations at Brunel and Sussex Universities in the UK (see: http://www.newleftproject.org/index.php/site/article_comments/the_iraqi_holocaust_90_years_of_imperial_genocide/ ).
Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed, “The Iraqi Holocaust: 90 years of imperial genocide” (2007): “We hear a lot about the “new” imperialism these days. Indeed, it’s become somewhat of an intellectual fad. Pundits, political commentators, and even professors have been busy debating the “new” Anglo-American empire. The one that spontaneously burst into existence sometime after 9/11, probably around the time of the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Volumes of academic verbiage along with pages of distilled analytical wisdom are poured into efforts to try and understand whether this “new” empire is good or bad for the world. Occasionally, we get a little bit of criticism of the failures of Bush and his neoconservative ideologues. Consistently left out of the debate is, of course, the existence of an overwhelmingly enormous Elephant occupying the Living Room of intellectual freedom.
What is this Elephant, and from whence does it come?
This Elephant symbolises that rather difficult subject matter known as the Brute Facts of History, the absence of which is what permits mainstream commentators to pontificate endlessly in a manner that serves not to illuminate, but to obscure.
Ignoring the Brute Facts of History, unfortunately, is integral to Western political culture. It permits a war for oil and power based on genocide to be paraded as exporting democracy and protecting security; it allows the systematization and globalization of mass death to be legitimized as necessary violence in the service of life itself. Western political culture survives on such methods of misinformation. For suppressing History is precisely how Western imperial power legitimizes its violence.
It is this systematic incapability to practice serious, sustained self-critique and self-reflection that prevents our societies from envisioning what we have been doing in Iraq as it truly is. For what we have perpetrated, and continue to perpetrate, is no less than a protracted 90-year Holocaust.” [1].
[1]. Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed, “The Iraqi Holocaust: 90 years of imperial genocide”, New Left Project, 15 December 2007: http://www.newleftproject.org/index.php/site/article_comments/the_iraqi_holocaust_90_years_of_imperial_genocide/ .
AHMED, Nafeez. UK writer on deaths in War on Terror. Nafeez Ahmed (UK-based scholar and writer) on 6 million deaths in War on Terror (2021): “For instance, six months after the bombing campaign in Afghanistan in 2001, data assessed by the Guardian revealed that, although between 1,300 and 1,800 Afghans were killed directly, as many as 20,000 and possibly as high as 49,600 people had died due to the indirect consequences of the military intervention. In this case, the total number of indirect deaths was at least 15 times higher than direct deaths. If that higher, empirically-substantiated ratio was applied to the Costs of War direct death figures in Afghanistan since 9/11 (176,000 people), it would imply 2,640,000 indirect deaths in that country to date, which would suggest that in just one country a total of about 2.8 million Afghans have been killed due to the War on Terror. This scale of violence has been corroborated by one other assessment of avoidable mortality in Afghanistan by retired La Trobe University biochemist Dr Gideon Polya. His book, Body Count: Global Avoidable Mortality Since 1950, put total excess deaths of Afghans since 2001 at three million” (Nafeez Ahmed, “Up to six million people. The unrecorded fatalities of the War on Terror”, Byline Times, 15 September 2021: https://bylinetimes.com/2021/09/15/up-to-six-million-people-the-unrecorded-fatalities-of-the-war-on-terror/ .)