Playing Number Games With Our Dead

I was in my hotel room this morning and found myself doing something not in my normal, everyday routine: I was watching CNN. Not because I had some kind of epiphany, but because it was the only cable news station offered in the room. It was what I watched that kind of set my mood for the day. The following is from the CNN website...

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2007 now the deadliest year for U.S. troops in Iraq BAGHDAD, Iraq (CNN) -- Six U.S. troops were killed in Iraq on Monday, making 2007 the deadliest for the American military in the Iraq war. The grim record came despite lower death rates in recent months, which were not enough to offset death tolls that topped 100 during three months in the spring. Four soldiers were killed when a roadside bomb exploded near their vehicle in northern Iraq's Tameem province; another died in combat in Anbar province. A sailor was killed in Salaheddin province "as a result of injuries sustained from an explosion while conducting operations," the military said. According to a CNN count of Pentagon figures, 855 U.S. service members have died so far in 2007. The next highest death toll was in 2004, when 849 were killed. The total number of U.S. military deaths in Iraq stands at 3,858, including seven civilian contractors of the Defense Department. The high number of deaths this year corresponds with the U.S. troop buildup called the "surge" and a crackdown on insurgents in and near Baghdad.

CNN's counting.. oh, and yes, blame it on the surge the left to this day calls a sham and is not working. What got me about this story was CNN's "attempt" to balance their coverage with a touchy-feely puff piece on soldiers returning home. Don't get me wrong, any time a soldier comes home alive it's a great story. But it would appear some at the major news networks are trying to play both sides of the fence, yet again. They want to appear to be "supporting the troops", yet their anti-war agenda keeps oozing through. I say this because I've always found the whole American-servicemember-bodycount thing repulsive. I find it repulsive because we hear about our casualties, that of the Iraqi citizens in the middle, but we never hear of the number of enemy dead. Why is that? Could it be that giving that number in contrast to our casualties may give an entirely different impression of how the war really is going? I have a woman back in Boston who can't watch the local "news at ten" whenever war segments come on. She has a son in Iraq. We seldom see stories of successes in Iraq on local broadcasts, despite the growing realization by those with eyes wide open, that things are much better there. And when it comes to local news, war news means a local casualty. But think about it. Listening to the major networks and print pubs war coverage is like listening to a football game on the radio and only hearing what they other side is doing. We hear when they score, but when we have the ball, the radio goes silent. With that, the impression would always be that we're behind or losing. When it comes to those against the war, that would be the desired impression to give the American people. As I said earlier, this has been bugging me for months now. In fact, last March I did a radio spot on this very subject... A few weeks ago in a column, I threw out a hypothetical. In war, the traditional way of gauging who is winning or not is, unfortunately, a count of battlefield casualties. It seems logical, the last man standing wins. But as I've always had problems with the media and their portrayal of things in the Middle East, I asked one simple question: how many of the enemy have we killed? We have everyone from activists to actors to congressmen and women to pundits all telling us how many of our servicemen and women have died in Iraq and Afghanistan. People keep score in blogs and even on the sides of their homes, yet we never hear the one number that may put at ease, for some, the sacrifice made by our sons and daughters. How many of the enemy have we killed? A simple question. The beauty of being an online columnist is that when you throw a question out there, sometimes someone who knows something about the topic contacts you and gives you the answer, which I'm happy to pass on to you. Larry Schweikart, Professor of History at the University of Dayton sent me the following:

Last August, President Bush invited me and a few other military historians to spend an hour with him in the Oval Office. When I brought up this "enemy dead" issue, he shook his head and said, "I'm afraid since Vietnam and the 'body counts' we really can't even use this as a measuring stick [as far as the public was concerned]." It was a sad commentary on how out of whack things got--especially if you think (as I do) that not all Muslims are terrorists. That means there are a finite number, and we have to be getting pretty close to the bottom of the barrel. Since then, I've updated the numbers with refinements and calculate that a low estimate of 30,000 terrorists have been killed since 9/11, and an upperbound number of 60,000. On top of that, between 120 and 240,000 terrorists have been wounded. This is where it gets tricky. Likely because their medicine isn't as good as ours, they have a higher death rate among wounded, which probably means that instead of 1 out of 8 dying of wounds, it's more like 3 out of 8, and that number is in my first set of stats. In addition, we have captured close to 50,000 terrorists in Afghanistan and Iraq since 9/11, and since the beginning of hostilities in Iraq, using traditional desertion rates, I figure at least another 10,000 jihadists have put away the old IED and gone home. So, a low estimate is that we have removed from the order of battle about 210,000 on the low end to 360,000 on the high end. This is an entire generation of jihadists, and will, if nothing else, significantly feminize Muslim society.

So those who wish to tell our nation, and the world, that we are losing the war on terror are living a lie. Those who wish to use our soldiers for political gain are no better than those shooting at them on the ground.

Number don't lie. People do

That radio spot offended the hell out of the usual activists. How dare I want to know how many of the enemy we've killed. How heartless, how cruel. I'm such a warmonger. But it's okay, on the other hand, to proudly display the number of Americans and Iraqis killed, primarily by the enemy, on the sides of homes, buildings, and on websites. THAT is what they consider the truth. I continue to be repulsed by our media and their playing games with the American people over the war. This is not a game. Our young people volunteered to serve, and despite the flawed reasoning given by Cindy Sheehan types, almost all who signed on the line knew where they'd be going and signed anyway. That takes more guts than most in the media will every have. That's what makes their playing number games with our dead more than disgusting. There ought to be a law.