4,000 Deaths: Is It All About the Numbers?

Iraq war numbers abound: five years; 4,000 American military deaths; 28,500 more (or fewer) troops; $5,000 per second; and X number of Iraqi military and civilian casualties — where the X is unknown, at least here at home.

The numbers can’t actually tell us what we should do, and they are all inhumanely impersonal. Despite whatever “success” has come from the surge, public support remains low. Five years seems so long, and 4,000 seems a number so extreme to the cause, and a war costing $5,000 per second seems so obscene, and gas is more than $3 a gallon, and our economy is now reeling. There are 224 days until Tuesday, Nov. 4.

Yesterday, four U.S. soldiers were killed when their vehicle in south Baghdad was hit by an IED, bringing the U.S. military death toll in Iraq to 4,000.

The mantra of the American military is, “We don’t do body counts.” As Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf, the commander of the Persian Gulf War, said in January 1991: “Body count means nothing, absolutely nothing…. All it is is a wild guess that tends to mislead people as to what’s going on…. I personally don’t like the idea of issuing body counts on a comparative basis. I think it puts undue pressure on commanders to come up with numbers that are unreal.”

Undoubtedly his views were a legacy of his own Vietnam experience, where numbers were used by Washington to prove that the United States was making progress, if not winning. The enemy body count came to connote corruption associated with manipulating the numbers.

And yet here we find ourselves, with the body count morphing to a controversial industry of tracking Iraqi civilian casualties, while any comparison between American military deaths and actual enemy deaths is beyond reach: We don’t know how many of the enemy there are at any given time, let alone know how their ranks have been depleted.

But the numbers keep coming. This just in over the weekend from U.S. military spokesmen: attacks down 60 percent since the number of U.S. troops reached nearly 168,000 last June; 2007 the deadliest year ever; the military is detaining 50 to 60 Iraqis a day compared with 20 to 30 a year ago.

As Schwarzkopf once maintained, once the body count becomes relevant, Washington and America begin to have an opinion. And eventually constraints are imposed on the “commander” and on American war-making.

I can already see the history being written that say it was all Rumsfeld’s fault, or Bush and Cheney’s, or the news media’s, or even the American public’s, which would not make enough sacrifices to fight terror. In that last calculation are the roots of our real national security crisis: People in uniform, people at the CIA and FBI and NSA, those doing to fighting and making the sacrifices, thinking that weak society itself, with its parsimonious standards about spending and its sentimental regard for human life, has become the enemy.

By William M. Arkin | March 24, 2008
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