[Iraq]

2,000 64,021 Dead

A sampling of the headlines: "2,000 Dead: As Iraq Tours Stretch On, a Grim Mark" (NY Times), "Number of Troops Killed in Iraq Passes 2,000" (LA Times), "2,000th Death Marked by Silence and a Vow" (Washington Post).

Actually, the death toll is unknown. While we have very nice records on our own soldiers, those they killed are less documented. There are the civilians, which Iraq Body Count places between 26 and 30k. Of course, those are just the reported deaths. There are Saddam's soldiers and the insurgents, which few have bothered to guess--though Tommy Franks puts the initial invasion's total at 30k. There are the 3,400 Iraqi security forces killed trying to mop up our mess (nearly twice our own total, wouldn't you think they'd warrant a mention?). Add the 300 civilian contractors, 73 journalists, and you can come up with rough, probably seriously underestimated, numbers.

But today the headlines read 2,000--a high enough number to cause the majority of Americans to get cold feet, but a number that vastly underestimates the human cost. I listened on NPR this morning as two families tearfully described losing their children to this war. They were US families talking about their sons in the US Army. But what about the families of the thirty thousand Iraqi troops who died during the "shock and awe?" We don't hear much about their suffering. But all right, war is hell. We're the good guys, so we reserve the right to avoid thinking about the families of the bad guys.

Okay, but what about the civilians who also died amid shock and awe?--those killed by missiles not quite as precise as FOX News described. Shouldn't we hear their tearful descriptions of losing their children to war? On NPR, Steve Inskeep asked whether the families felt their sons' lives were lost in a futile war. Do we care to ask the civilians whom we freed from Saddam's evil grip the same question? Should we ask if their sacrifice was worth the beautiful democracy we've delivered unto them? Do we have the stomach to hear the answer?

The dead have been piling up in Iraq for over two years. Our selective count makes a lot of things easy. We've chosen 2,000 of those dead to honor because it accords with old notions we have of the US as the "good" guys. We see a US serviceman and we think of Normandy.

Start counting US civilians killed there, and we must uncomfortably ask questions about no-bid contracts given to the Vice President's former employer. Start counting civilians and you have to compare the number of graves we've made with Saddam's total. A morally uncomfortable count. Even the Iraqis on our team, the police and security forces who will carry this country forward after we've abandoned it--even those dead we don't count, because then we might start to wonder if the country they carry forward will be a democracy. If not, there then arises a number of very uncomfortable questions about this grand neocon experiment of "spreading peace throughout the Middle East."

You notice how "coalition" force deaths are no longer much mentioned? You don't suppose that's because there never was a coalition, and mentioning these troops only highlights what an arrogant, singular folly our "Leader of the Free World" mounted. Start reporting those dead, and you've begun pulling on a thread that goes back to the UN, where the free nations said they refused to follow the US into this war. You keep tugging that thread, and pretty soon you ask the question about why we fought this war in the first place, and--oh right, Weapons of Mass Destruction, well never mind.

There is a great deal of blood on American hands. It comes from a great deal more than 2,000 bodies. If we are going to choose an arbitrary number to look back and measure the cost of this war--as the papers did today, as the US Senate obscenely did yesterday--let's do it right. Let's pick a number that comes closer to the truth. Thanks to our invasion, 64,021 people have died.

Were their lives worth it?