This argument reflects a profound misunderstanding of the basic facts of the Iraq War, one with the Brown CoW project has only intensified by failing to contextualize this violence. The 200k Iraqi civilians killed is largely from the Iraqi civil war and other intra-Iraqi violence, not the US/
doing Vietnam-style bombings of civilians in the countryside that actually did kill tens of thousands of people (prob more). People forget how much of the iraq War was Iraqis v Iraqis because it doesn't fit a simple morality tale.
Was that already happening before the US attacked?
But that's a different claim. There's a difference between "The US massacred 200000 people" and "the US destabilized a country by invasion, and a lot of other people started killing each other." It's not exactly a defense of the Iraq War to make that distinction.
We certainly did cause direct civilian deaths in Iraq, that’s not disputed. It’s also a difference without a distinction, our military invaded a sovereign country knowing that it would cause the instability to led to thousands of indirect deaths.
it's a legally and morally salient difference.
It’s a weird hair to split. If the argument is that the US and its military sits on an elevated moral plane then it’s hard to square that with the fact that it carried out an illegal attack that caused so many direct and indirect civilian deaths.
what you said here is a quite reasonable way to put it.
It's a very important difference from the standpoint of international law. Also, the decision to invade Iraq is more relevant to questions of US government conduct while the number of civilians US forces actually killed is relevant to questions of their conduct. www.icrc.org/en/law-and-p...
also, to be clear, the numbers are for direct deaths, not indirect
Strange how people can tell that the US killed a lot of Iraqis while the US military was occupying Iraq and kliling people.