Change For A Nickel

“We don’t do body counts.” From Gen. Tommy Franks infamous reply to a question from the press regarding the number of Iraqis who have died during the war and occupation. Being former military I often found that statement to be so full of bullshit I could smell the stench a mile away in a lilac field. The military is notirous for keeping statistics. That’s a huge part of what they do. They make fatality projections for military and civilian losses, compare projections to actual, blah, blah, blah. Hell, there is probably a whole section at the Pentagon devoted to just such a thing!

So now we have a brand new study from John Hopkins about the death toll in Iraq and these numbers blow all previous estimates out of the water. The study says over 600,000 civilians have been killed! Even I have a hard time believing that number. Regardless if these numbers are accurate or not I think it brings to light what has not been discussed enough during the current conflict. Civilians are being brutally killed at a rate 10 times the number of military. If we use GW’s (extremely low) estimate of 30,000 civilians being killed since the war began that is still a huge number. That breaks down to over 23 people a day since the beginning of the war. As trajic as it is to hear about one of our own being killed in this debacle of a war it is equally as trajic to hear the pain of an Iraqi mother grieving over the loss of her child. I think we need to look past the numbers and use our humanity to try and begin to understand what these losses actually mean on a human level. Then maybe we will have the collective will to end this mess.