Pandora's Box in Mesopotamia

The Wikileaks documents seem to support the idea that most deaths in Iraq were caused by sectarian violence, between rival groups of Iraqis such as the Sunnis and the Shias, rather than by Americans or Brits or even Security Contractors.

The reports in the archive disclosed by WikiLeaks offer an incomplete, yet startlingly graphic portrait of one of the most contentious issues in the Iraq war — how many Iraqi civilians have been killed and by whom.

The reports make it clear that most civilians, by far, were killed by other Iraqis. Two of the worst days of the war came on Aug. 31, 2005, when a stampede on a bridge in Baghdad killed more than 950 people after several earlier attacks panicked a huge crowd, and on Aug. 14, 2007, when truck bombs killed more than 500 people in a rural area near the border with Syria.

But it was systematic sectarian cleansing that drove the killing to its most frenzied point, making December 2006 the worst month of the war, according to the reports, with about 3,800 civilians killed, roughly equal to the past seven years of murders in New York City. A total of about 1,300 police officers, insurgents and coalition soldiers were also killed in that month.

The documents also reveal many previously unreported instances in which American soldiers killed civilians — at checkpoints, from helicopters, in operations. Such killings are a central reason Iraqis turned against the American presence in their country, a situation that is now being repeated in Afghanistan.

Some might think that this leaves the Americans 'off the hook' for all the death and destruction. But I disagree. We were the ones who took the top off this Mesopotamian 'Pandora's Box' by our invasion and occupation, so we have to bear the onus for the killing that resulted, it seems to me. We are responsible.

When we are calculating the effects of our military interventions around the world, we should not neglect these kind of horrible and tragic unintended consequences.  These people are human beings, after all, deserving of the same respect that we expect for ourselves.