Freedom of Information - 7 June 1991

In the last month or so we've had an alternating trickle and flood of studies, reports, figures which if you were a student doing a thesis or a journalist doing a book and were desperate for a title, might be brought together under the heading, "The Accounting" – the accounting, that is, for the Gulf War.

The latest of these documents came out this week and the more I look at it the more extraordinary it becomes. The United States Department of Defense put it out on Tuesday and you might shortly wonder why. It's an estimate of the Iraqi military losses in the war. After the, what was the fairly final figure, 500-some American casualties, the Iraqi count is a shocker. The Pentagon tentatively estimates 100,000 Iraqi soldiers killed, 300,000 wounded and 150,000 deserters. There was no mention of prisoners of war, which the Americans said were about 60,000 when the war ended. No mention either of civilian casualties.

This report prefaces its figures with this remarkably constricting sentence "It has been determined that little information is available which would enable this agency to make an accurate assessment of Iraqi military casualties, very limited information leads us tentatively to state the following, which" – in brackets – " carries an error factor of 50% or higher". So, if it's any help to anybody, governments, military historians, census takers, you and me, which I doubt, the defence department could be off the hook if it turned out after an accurate count and unlimited information that the Iraqi casualties were either just over 250,000 thousand or well over 700,000. At this point you'd be right to wonder why the defence department would put out a study which it confesses is based on very limited information and could be wrong by as much as 50%. The answer is what makes this a very interesting novelty.

I'm sure the Pentagon had no wish of its own to publish this stuff but it was forced to do so as many other government departments, not least the FBI are forced to publish these days, because somebody, sometimes and organisation, more often an individual American wants to know the truth buried in a government report, FBI file whatever. He, she has the right to find out by making a request under a law which I believe no other country has ever enacted, the Freedom of Information Act, passed in 1974. The really huge resources that an ordinary citizen can call on because of the passage of this act are dramatically demonstrated in a couple of sentences in a big book published about five years ago called The Agency. It's a history of the CIA, the Central Intelligence Agency. It's over 800 pages long and the author mentions quite casually, I did not approach the CIA itself in the course of writing this book. He didn't need to, "since, the Freedom of Information Act has enabled me to consult many thousands of documents". If this man had published his book before 1974, I imagine it couldn't have been much more than 100 pages long.

So the department of defence against all its instincts and wishes was made to publish what it could about Iraqi casualties because something called the National Defense Council, it's an environmental group, wrote a letter and asked the defence department to stand and deliver, politely disguised as a request under the Freedom of Information Act. The act, everybody agrees is an audacious and noble exercise of democracy and we wouldn't want it repealed for anything, though I'm quite sure that it's the first thing an American dictator would repeal even before the constitution. Still you can see that at times it could throw more fog than light on a situation.

I'd say that the Pentagon was not to be blamed, nobody would believe a government department ever which said in response to a request, under the Freedom of Information, I'm sorry but at the moment we have very limited information and couldn't give you half way accurate figures. That would sound like the sure sign of a cover up.

Very shortly after the end of the war, it was noticeable in the business pages that the arms industry had been renewed very briskly by all the regular parties of the first part, countries, dealers, and most strikingly in the high-tech department which, it had been demonstrated most nights on television had contributed most to the dazzling success of a short war. We were invited to marvel at the precise capabilities of the smart bombs, except in the matter of that one shelter, a lamentable incident that never has been satisfactorily explained.

To most of us who are not in the business of buying or selling arms, or even like little boys in all wars, identifying them as a hobby, the big weapons hero was the Patriot which was seen so often detonating Saddam's soaring Scud missiles. But though not much has been made of it since the first revelation, the Patriot is something less than a magic defender. American military commentators were not challenged when they reported after the war that the Patriot succeeded more often in simply breaking up the war head into many pieces and so scattering its falling damage over a wider field.

More serious misgivings about the brutal but accurate splendour of our war machine were aroused by the news that Japanese technology makes the United States air force and American tanks possible. That in all tanks, radar and air-to -air missiles depend for their key components on Japanese transistors and microchips. There are 19 American weapons systems that use foreign components. This rather jittery news came out in much detail shortly after Mr Bush made a speech, I think it was in Massachusetts, citing the Gulf war as a sign of the triumph of American technology. Several electronics experts and researchers here filled us in on the dim news that, while the United States may lead in some consumer software, the Japanese are the unquestioned leaders in hardware. That most of America's weapons were designed 15 to 20 years ago but are now maintained by key components from other countries. That, for instance, the United States may have invented semiconductors and chips but the Japanese took them over and developed them beyond our capacity.

The conclusion of one round of, round-table of experts the Japanese present politely deferring to the conclusion without shouting here, here, was that in electronics research Americans have tended to think of the quick buck. One American summed up the historical situation bluntly. "The United States," he said, "looks 10 minutes ahead, the Japanese 10 years ahead."

On the human front there will be, as Duke Ellington said, some changes made. A bill is coming up before Congress to make it right and proper, that's to say legal, for women to serve in combat. Until now army regulations have forbidden them to be even I believe, as we used to say, at the front or, as we now say, in a combat zone. The appearance on night-time television of one American woman with her arm in a splint and the word that she'd been wounded and captured was enough in itself to make women in the services – and of course they are in all the services – challenge the rule that they must at all times stay, so to speak behind the lines. There's no question that the bill will go through.

And this can't help reminding me of a talk I did many years ago when the Congress and the country were much agitated by what was known in political shorthand as ERA, the Equal Rights Amendment. This was a proposed amendment to the constitution it would be the 27th, which said, "Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex" – very simple, you'd think. After furious debate all across the country for several years, it never went through. It did pass both Houses but to become law a constitutional amendment must be ratified by the legislatures of three quarters of the states. Which means 38 states.

The women's so called equal rights amendment didn't make it, I forget now by how many it fell short. There were when last I talked about it 13 that turned it down, for various reasons. The most antediluvian of which was Oklahoma's contention that the Bible doesn't say women are men's equals. In two industrial states it was organised labour that mounted the opposition, fearing that women would demand equal rights and pay as brick layers, engineers, electricians, so on, which has already happened. Then there was a posse of women in some states anxious to preserve some inequalities, to see that, for instance, wandering husbands still supported their children. One witness who toured several state legislatures was horrified at the prospect of women being made subject to a military draft. "Can you see women going into combat," she said, "wearing 40-pound packs?" Well yes, we just did. This debate was waged and lost back in 1973. That, I find, is when I did that talk. It's comic now a little galling for me I must admit to look back at my own what I must have thought at the time was a rather droll ending. "Wouldn't it be an interesting twist,"' I said, "if five, 10 years from now, worthy women were in the marines and worthless men were getting alimony". Well, 18 years later anyway, it's commonplace, there are many women marines and many loafing males being kept by their divorced wives.

The equal rights amendment hasn't come up again. As a postscript, I might add that this week the Episcopal bishop of Washington ordained the church's first lesbian priest. The United States boxing commission licensed its first woman referee, she has two small children; she takes care of babes by day, bruisers by night.

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