The Body Count Police

In a story slated for the front page on Monday, Bradley Graham files Enemy Body Counts Revived:

Eager to demonstrate success in Iraq, the U.S. military has abandoned its previous refusal to publicize enemy body counts and now cites such numbers periodically to show the impact of some counterinsurgency operations.

The revival of body counts, a practice discredited during the Vietnam War, has apparently come without formal guidance from the Pentagon's leadership. Military spokesmen in Washington and Baghdad said they knew of no written directive detailing the circumstances under which such figures should be released or the steps that should be taken to ensure accuracy.

Instead, they described an ad hoc process that has emerged over the past year, with authority to issue death tolls pushed out to the field and down to the level of division staffs....

During the Vietnam War, enemy body counts became a regular feature in military statements intended to demonstrate progress. But the statistics ended up proving poor indicators of the war's course. Pressure on U.S. units to produce high death tolls led to inflated tallies, which tore at Pentagon credibility.

Yet the Washington Post is perfectly happy publishing figures on the American body count. Its Iraq coverage includes a regular feature variously called Iraq War Deaths and Iraq Casualties. It runs maybe every other day. Its content varies, but always includes, as shown at left from an example I scanned on Sept. 20, total U.S. fatalities and the breakdown between deaths from hostile actions and accidents. It also includes briefs identifying the latest U.S. military deaths. The Casualties box, of course, is broader. In the Oct. 22 edition of the Post, it included: The total number of wounded; allied military fatalities "from Britain and other nations;" U.S. civilian fatalities; and Iraqi civilian fatalities, with a minimum and maximum estimate.

Want to get a feel for how often this runs? Use my new Categories section in the left-hand column and click on "Iraq in the Post Today." That'll call up my tracking of the Post's Iraq coverage Monday through Friday (and excluding a ten-day break early in the fall). Then do a search for "Death Tally Box," which is what I've been calling both boxes. It doesn't link to anything in my summaries because I haven't been able to find the identical item online. As the nearest online equivalent, I used to link to Faces of the Fallen, another way the Post counts U.S. dead. Online, washingtonpost.com provides that database, and periodically the paper publishes a mutipage spread of American casualties, under the same banner.

There is, at least, something familiar about the Washington Post meticulously recording our own losses but having a Vietnam Quagmire flashback when we try to measure our victories.

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Comments

[Gregor Samsa]

So what exactly is the point that you are trying to make here? That the Post is biased because it publishes the numbers of US/Coalition deaths? Are you upset that the media is acknowledging the fact that nearly 2000 coalition troops have died in Iraq? Is this not news? Or do they publish the counts too frequently for your taste? Would once a month be acceptable? Every six months? Or perhaps after we leave the media should publish the coalition death count as a footnote to an article describing the smashing success that has been our Iraq experience?

"Enemy" body counts in guerilla wars have long been suspect for a variety of reasons including the difficulty in distinguishing between civilian and non-civilian deaths and the tendency of both sides to inflate or deflate counts as seen fit for political reasons.

[Christopher Fotos]

To quote, er, me:

There is, at least, something familiar about the Washington Post meticulously recording our own losses but having a Vietnam Quagmire flashback when we try to measure our victories.

I say let's try counting the dead from both sides. Pretty simple idea.

[n.o.t.l.f]

What's your criteria for counting Iraqi deaths (or to put it in your cute words for dead people, "victories")? In a firefight if a U.S. solider kills someone firing at them, then it's pretty easy to confirm a kill -- but what about a bombing? Or blowing up a building? Who is an insurgent? Who is a civilian?

Forget Vietnam, there's already been several stories where the discrepency between Pentagon numbers of 'insurgents killed' and those that Iraqi authorities have claimed.

I'll leave it to you to sort out which ones are victories and which ones are tragedies. And anyway, I don't think anyone at all would question our mighty ability to kill more people than any insurgency, army or marauding huns on the planet. It's nice of you to wonder just how many that is.

[Adam Graham]

Well, of course they have a problem with us releasing enemy body counts. That might give people perspective and we mustn't have that.