Six men burned alive, an entire government ministry kidnapped, over two hundred dead in a series of car bombs. Another week in Iraq. Nothing new and headline news.

We have become anaesthetised to the pain of the conflict in Iraq. The sheer scale of bloodshed has numbed our comprehension of what the violence means in human terms. What would have been termed “spectaculars” in the bad old days of the IRA are just day to day events in Iraq. Our perspective is becoming distorted through a kaleidoscope of laser-guided bombs and razor-sharp satellite images. The cemeteries are filling up and human lives are becoming numbers, or less.

So far in Iraq, America has nearly lost the same number of soldiers as civilians murdered in the 9/11 atrocity. Although images of the coffins of the American war dead are not allowed to be shown since the Bush administration banned them in March 2003, at least the Americans are granted the unseen dignity of being counted as individuals by the Department of Defence and borne home in flag-draped coffins. But Iraqi civilian deaths are not counted by the US government.

To armchair warriors in Washington ignoring Iraqi casualties is perhaps an extension of the de-humanising concept of collateral damage. To the Arab and Muslim world glued to their satellite TVs, the little limp bodies being rushed to hospitals in the Mickey Mouse T-shirts could be their children. That none of these Iraqi deaths will ever be officially recorded makes it hard for the viewer not to conclude that an American life is not equal to an Arab life.

John Hopkins School of Public Health has calculated Iraqi civilian deaths and their estimates vary between a third of a million to 900,000 dead. The lower fatality estimate is almost the same as the total number of British civilian and military fatalities in the Second World War (388,000). The higher Iraqi fatality figure is almost identical to the total number of British soldiers killed in the First World War (908,000).

The US and Britain have disputed these figures and this is not surprising. If these estimates are correct, or even in the right region, these fatality figures will have far-reaching consequences for a war started with questionable, at best, legitimacy. Fatality figures this high could make the US and British governments culpable for over-seeing the second genocide in the Middle East since the Armenian holocaust in which over a million were killed between 1915 and 1917.

The definition of genocide from Article 2 of the Convention on Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide is intent to wholly or partially destroy any religious, ethnic or national group through killing or causing bodily or mental harm. The wholesale sectarian slaughter between Iraqi Sunnis and Iraqi Shia undoubtedly qualifies as mutual attempts at genocide.

The first Middle Eastern genocide since 1917 was perpetrated by Saddam Hussein and became one of the justifications of the war after the Weapons of Mass Destruction were never found. In what Human Rights Watch rightly termed a “genocide” in 1993, between 50,000 and 182,000 Kurds were killed by Saddam. But if the figures are correct, and we have no other data to go on, then the current situation in Iraq dwarfs even the evil done by the Saddam regime.

Wilful failure to record the victims of the US-led and British-backed 2003 war is perhaps an attempt to not create evidence which could be used for war crimes and genocide prosecutions against the politicians responsible. But there is no statute of limitations on war crimes and the new generation of mass graves in the post-Saddam era can be excavated for the evidence.

The United States and Britain should recognise the terrible gravity of the situation they created and start recording the Iraqi victims of this war. These records may become part of eventual prosecutions for genocide, but the evidence is there anyway. What it will do is allow some dignity in death to the victims and their families.

Few predicted that the situation in Iraq would ever amount to murder on a genocidal scale. Every murdered soul makes it harder to see a way out or where the killing will lead next. An all-out regional war with millions of victims would have been unthinkable only three years ago. But in a world where Arab casualties are not counted, perhaps it is not such a distant possibility. As regional tensions rise, regional solutions must be pursued.

The door to regional peace in the Middle East is in Jerusalem and it can and must be pushed open – it is in everyone’s best interests, including Israel. The US has pressured its allies before. Let us not forget that George Bush senior was the President who forced Israeli participation in the Madrid Process through threatening to withhold loan guarantees. Peace for Palestine may not stop the bloodshed in Iraq, but it will go a good way for the US and Britain to start winning back the Arab people and perhaps prove to them that Arab lives do count.

Anwar Al Darkazally is a political analyst an was the legal adviser to the Negotiations Support Unit (NSU) of the PLO with responsibility for the Jerusalem file in final status negotiations.

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