Body Count
In the past, President Bush has expressed his concern about releasing the body count of enemy fighters killed or captured in Iraq. Late last year, the president sat down with a number of conservative journalists and talked about the absence of daily body counts in the Iraq war. “We have made a conscious effort not to be a body-count team . . . [which] gives you the impression that [U.S. troops] are just there--kind of moving around, directing traffic, and somebody takes a shot at them and they’re down.”In fact, that is exactly the impression one gets watching the evening news. But that might be starting to change. On a day when twin car bombs killed more than a hundred people on the streets of Baghdad, and after a weekend that saw 27 American servicemen killed (13 of them in a helicopter crash and another five when gunmen posing as American soldiers slipped through security and attacked a provincial headquarters in Karbala), the U.S. military looks set, at long last, to report the number of enemy fighters killed. From Reuters:
The U.S. military said on Monday 93 rebels were killed and 57 captured in a 10-day operation against al Qaeda-linked insurgents northeast of Baghdad.I've never understood the government's resistance to reporting numbers of enemy dead. Sure, there are all types of problems with putting an emphasis on body counts, not least of which is a tendency to overestimate the number killed and create a false sense of progress. Still, every day Americans turn on their TVs and see the number of Americans killed that day, the number of Iraqis slaughtered by terrorist attacks, and not a single bit of evidence that American troops and Iraqi forces are getting the bad guys, too. It won't change the facts on the ground, but the American people deserve to know what they're getting for more than $4 billion a month. Last week they got close to 100 dead insurgents and 57 captured.
