What the Number 3000 Hides
Iraqi guerrillas killed 6 more GIs and AP put the total dead in combat at 2998. The dreadful milestone of 3000 is upon us.
Like all statistics, this one is deceptive. It does not include US troops killed in Afghanistan, that oddly forgotten war where the US still has a division engaging in active combat. Nor is it nice to ignore NATO dead in Afghanistan, including French and Canadians (yes).
The number does not include the Coalition troops killed in Iraq. The sacrifices of the British, Italians, and others should be included.
And why ignore the seriously wounded? These brave warriors have brain damage, or spinal damage, or have lost limbs or been burned and disfigured. There are probably 8000 of them. Their sacrifice should be foregrounded. Life is not going to be easy for them, and they are not goiing to get that much help from Bush.
Indeed, why not count all the wounded? The number must be near 25000 by now.
Then there are all the I raq Vets with post traumatic stress disorder and a myriad of other combat related mental diseases. There is alcoholism, domestic violence, divorce.
The true number of Americans and US allies who are in some sense casualties of war is in the tens of thousands.
3000 is a horrible number. But it is not the only dreadful number. By concentrating on it, Washington politicians and the US press hide from us the true magnitude of the problems we face in Iraq and Afghanistan.
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traveling and posting by treo, so no hyperlinks.
posted by Juan Cole @ 12/31/2006 12:30:00 AM
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26 Comments:
While appearing somewhat cynical, woundings, maimings, and deaths are all part of an acceptable risk according to society's standards. Three thousand amortised over four years represents about 750 per year. According to website Iraq Coalition Casualties (http://icasualties.org/oif/), there've been somewhere around 47,000 non-mortal casualties with variations of effects upon each and every one, individually, running at almost twelve thousand per year. Afghanistan has a significantly less number (around 100 for 2006; a little over 500 total overall) associated.
To put this into context, the acceptable risk for driving cars is between thirty and forty thousand dead per year and an unknown number of wounded and maimed, with associated mental and physical costs having to be astronomical. Over four years, somewhere on the order of 120-160,000 people have lost their lives on American roadways, a risk people are willing to take inasmuch as the benefits offset the dangers. Of course, the health care and automobile industries reap all kinds of benefits whenever their services or products are required anew. Road warrioring in "tanks" of all descriptions is just dandy.
The cynical aspect of this -- balancing risks according to activity -- does not take into account that almost everything about Iraq was avoidable and preventable as it is NOT part of anyone's lifestyle and is certainly NOT counted as an accident. We might consider Iraq to correspond to an enraged driver taking his or her anger out on a busy sidewalk full of pedestrians or trying to effect a "Blues Brothers" cop (or any) car mass traffic accident. The end result is death and property destruction that's caused by those who have some reality perception problems, attempting to draw too many people into some odd sense of (un)reality, with society -- either the particular city involved or the movie theatre patrons -- picking up the tab for whatever happens.
Accordingly, Iraq (and Afghanistan) have been relatively safe, as has been pointed out by a number of people, R Murdoch included recently. The moral and morale costs have yet to be determined in that claims as to who's winning and who's losing have yet to be defined and resolved. The sad thing is that those who are behind all of this, their risks equating to being professionally driven everywhere, are not suffering very much. It is VERY safe for them and their families while the ones who have to drive themselves everywhere in all conditions get to make up statistics.
what about those soldiers who did not make out it out alive from Walter Reed or the hospitals in Germany too?
...not to mention the number of non-military contract employees operating as de facto military troops. At times, the number of contract combatants has been as high as 100,000 (and perhaps still may be--official numbers are hard to come by), and their casualty rates would be equivalent to those of the "official" military troops. I've always suspected that the actual casualty count was about double the government's official number.
All good questions!
DNI posts a monthly graph of Coalition dead in Iraq and Afghanistan by month since May 2003:
http://www.defense-and-society.org/fcs/pdf/iraq_fatalities.pdf
The December total, not yet posted, will mark new highs for the 4, 6, and 8 month moving averages. Grim news, with of course no progress in exchange.
Defense & the National Interest (DNI) is an online journal about military and geo-political issues. Their analysis of Iraq has proven quite accurate (i.e., pessimistic), more so than the general media or even specialists such as Stratfor.
Maybe someone can answer this:
If a person is severely wounded in Iraq, but makes it off the battlefield, is transported to Germany and dies in the medical facilities there, is that person counted as wounded in Iraq?
I assume that making it to Germany means that a soldier was not killed in action, is there a way of knowing how many soldiers have died of wounds sustained in Iraq but not exactly on the battlefield?
3000 is a horrible number. But it is not the only dreadful number.
Indeed.
655,000 comes to mind.
War dead are one thing. War wounded are another, and poorly accounted or reported by the media. Improvements in medicine greatly increase battle survival rates, but cannot replace lost organs or limbs. The victims may not come back in coffins, but many will have a hard time returning to normal life. Divorces and broken families are another under-tabulated human and social cost.
One WAPO journalist Michael Weisskopf, embedded in a US unit, suffered injury and wrote a book about wounded convalescing. The book ostensibly glorifies the sacrifice of the wounded. Unfortunately, there is nothing to quantify the scope or eventual consequences. In an on-line discussion of his book, Weisskopf brushed off a person who asked about where to find hard data on the numbers and extend of injuries, telling him "Go try Google." Obviously,
90% of books sold about war cater a blend of pious patriotism, sanctified violence, and sublime gore. There is less market for books that squarely address the unglorious consequences: poverty, chaos, disability, and waste. Weisskopf's "Blood Brothers" tells a story of people who suffer pain and sacrifice, but leaves the "why" as a divine mystery and cares not to weigh the macro-social outcome.
The defenselink.mil and icasualties.org sites give raw numbers on dead and wounded, but I have not seen any statistical survey of the degree of recovery or lasting disability of the latter. Does anyone know of a good current report or source? One raw "objective" measure might be the quotient that returns to civilian work with no need for public assisance or whose therapy and rehabilitation costs do not exceed their earnings.
And let us not also forget the truly horrible number - over 650,000 Iraqis killed since the US invasion due to the violence of the US occupation...
While people may dispute this number, or dispute the American complicity in these deaths, the numbers are real enough for the Iraqis who have lost a family member to violence since March 2003...
A few days ago, on Christmas Eve, I penned this short poem to ease the pain of coping with the level of violence that I am viewing on Al Jazeera English online:
"By the rivers of Babylon,
Where they sat down,
Lo, they wept,
When they remembered Saigon."
The Vietnam War is still remembered in America as an American tragedy, but people forget that the American casualties in Vietnam were almost insignificant compared to the millions of lives torn apart among the Vietnamese... If a wall were to be built as a memorial to the Vietnamese killed in that war, it would entirely encircle and choke Washington...
And so the Iraqis are now suffering through their own Bush War... And while we lament the good Americans killed in Iraq, let us not forget the number of Iraqis who have died so that, among other things, the Democrats could retake Congress. Had the Iraqis laid down in cowardice, and allowed the Neoconmen to run their boots over them, the Democrats would still be cowing in the shadows, parroting the jingoistic nonsense of the Bushiites.
There has been an intensive campaign to hide the cost of Bushès Mesopotamian Misadventure. The US casualities have been hidden by several techniques. One is the conscious omission of Iraqi casualities, both civilian and among the security forces. Those of Iraqi security forces, of course, run five times higher than those of US, spending much time in their firebases. The matrix thrashed the Lancet study of Iraqi civilian casualities without seriously questioning the methodology. The thing to keep in mind of their stratospheric estimates is that these measured mostly direct casualities rather than indirect ones as a result of lack of medicine and healthcare.
The US casualities are just a small fraction of the total, but they are significant enough and deliberately hidden, first of all, by preventing the media from covering the horrors suffered by US troops. Battle wounds are whitewashed from broadcast snippets and the wounded are ensconced out of sight in Walter Reed and other overflowing facilities. The estimates I have seen are that the USès severely wounded and seriously incapicated, number 22,000 thanks to body armor and battlefield medicine. This, of course, would cover a wide range of injuries preventing future military service and does not include PTSS and other psychological ailments given the battlefied conditions inside Iraq, most of which goes untreated.
We should also include the economic cost, which is at least 600 billion passed mostly through emergency supplementals and partly hidden through black budgets and secret transfers in the Defense budget. One could surely reckon at least 1.2 trillion in future medicinal obligations to the currently wounded. All such obligations also have a cost to society as whole in terms of senior care, Katrina relief, social security and the like as the deficits Bush incurred come due. This is to say nothing of the economic correction or crash that will have to ensue from this superheated war economy. One would expect a stagflation scenario similiar to Vietnam given that our spending will outpace that conflict in the very near future.
Hiding the cost of the war has been a central part and little covered aspect of Bushès war strategy. Like the justification for the war, Rove seems to have reached for a Goebbels Model. Hitler understood that keeping domestic support for a bloody war would require a material suture and first Jewish wealth and second that of conquered nations was used to increase consumer spending all throughout the war. This reflected Hitlerès realization that the decline of domestic spending had produced a collapse of morale in Germany during the first world war and he put luxury production very high on his agenda well into 1944, even at the cost of the war industrial complex.
Bushès dictate to the public to be patriotic and shop and the refusal to install a draft is part of successful strategy to retain support for a war that achieved nothing for the US. But with the middle class being pinched and the Army reaching a breaking point, the bill is now coming due. What is amazing is how the mainstream media still covers up this tremendous price tag of Bushès volitional and unnecessary war?
I'm googling but can't find it yet, so I'll ask you:
Which Bush administration official was it who said something to the effect that the American people won't mind a few soldiers dead? Wasn't it Wolfowitz? All I'm turning up at the moment is his blunder when he underestimated actual American deaths in testimony to Congress (he said 500 so far, and it was already past 700).
I think that pulling the "won't mind" comment out from the memory hole would be informative.
Just reading what you wrote back in 2003 is disturbing - you were right about so much of what has come to pass in Iraq. God help us all.
3000, that is just the number of killed in action, not include those that died after vacating the combat zone in ambulances, during transport to Germany and those thousands that in fact died n the German hospitals either before they were operated on or after. The number of American dead in the Iraq conflict when you count all is in excess of 25,000 dead U.S. military personnel. Then count the American contractors number.
What a tragedy. All this is for oil and money, nothing more. The poor dies and suffers for life to make the rich richer.
I find the deaths of 650,000+ Iraqis to be much more horrible than the deaths of 3,000+ US troops.
The troops all had a choice, the Iraqis generally did not. The troops all choose to be combatants, the Iraqis generally did not.
To answer Arnold Evans' question, if a soldier is wounded in Iraq and then transported to either Germany or the US before he succumbs to his injuries, it is counted in the total. You can see over at icasualties that some soldiers have their place of death listed as Germany, e.g. Pfc Eric R. Wilkus on Christmas day, and in a few cases if you read the details you will find the soldier made it back to America before passing, e.g. Sgt. Edward Shaffer on Dec. 27 at Brooke Army medical center in Texas.
Not counted in the total are suicides that occur in the US, even though there are several reports of soldiers either taking their own lives or attempting "suicide via police" while distraught over having to report back to Iraq.
Those who design weapons and tactics actually consider wounding enemy personel to be the most effective result and therefore design for that purpose. A dead soldier takes just one person off the battlefield, but a wounded one takes three or more to take care of that one, plus all the effort and expense of transporting and caring for that one.
The true cost of all this is beyond calculation. And everything we have done to them, we have done to ourselves.
Obviously the degree and amount of war wounded is not adequately reported.
The next question is who should know. Who can be pressured to release the information?
I think Congress, or even one or more members of Congress could demand these statistics from the Pentagon or the VA.
All that is left to organize is a campaign to contact Congresspeople to either get answers or get the Executive Branch to publicly refuse to give the answers.
Juan, first thanks for your dogged, valuable work.
Let's hope for a happier more constructive new year in the world's trouble spots.
My understanding is that the fatality count does not include badly wounded soldiers who subsequently die in military hospitals or during their evacuation.
The dead and wounded are indeed tragic costs of this war. The economic cost is staggering - trillions spent so oil companies can profit.
But just as tragic to me is the loss of America's stature in the world, and the long-term damage done to our ability to influence world events. We are watching America be eclipsed, and our generation will be the last ones to remember it at the peak of its power.
The age of China and India rising is upon us... and America will not let its empire decline easily. There is worse ahead than we can imagine yet.
Here is the "running" list of Iraq Coalition Casualties including deaths, injuries, etc. It is updated as the deaths occur and names are added as available.
http://icasualties.org/oif/
Mr Cole, you are 'Juan' of the people we can 'count' on.
As a Canadian whose previous Prime Minister (Jean Chretin) kept us outta I(R)aq and whose current one (Harper) avoided real debate while expanding our role in Afghanistan once the Bush Administration largely abandon it, I too am vexed by the extensive avoidance of the extensive damage done to the world by an Administration foreign policy so crude and primitive, it can only find its reflection in Radical Islamists crude primitive vision and actions.
This time 'round, they aren't using the Domino analogy, because it is so apt, I think ... Stay and have the Dominos fall ... or ... Leave and have the Dominos fall. Phuck up like this as a ditch digger and they take your shovel away.
AND we still have CNN offering up 'Victory' as something other than deranged, destructive, delusion ....
Snerd
Narcissism is defined as having no concern but for yourself, and the US is the poster child. 3000 is a big deal if it's Americans, whether on 9-11-2001 or in Iraq. But the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis by sanctions leading up to that, never mind the millions or 100,000s here and there elsewhere in the world through such American benevolence - who cares?
What really horrifies me is that the only way for the killing in Iraq to stop is for as many Americans to be killed there as possible. If it had been one a week since the invasion, they could have slaughtered 4-5 million Iraqis and umpteen others and no one would notice - or indeed, so much the better in their eyes. And if it had been a tank or a helicopter a day from the get-go, they would be long gone. Only American deaths in any way motivate Americans to maybe want to stop annihilating masses of people in Iraq and go away.
That's horrible. I don't even know how to endure such reality.
Total non-mortal casualties are 46,880 according to www.casualties.org/oif. This includes injuries like diseases and non-combat injuries.
In the months leading up to the invasion it was hard to find any politicians or pundits willing to object to it for humanitarian reasons. To do so was to be labeled a spineless, bleeding heart pacifist. Surely no aspiring politician would put himself or herself in such a position.
So we have a mentality that war is a reasonable enterprise as long as it can be portrayed during the runup as relatively painless (to us), bound to succeed, and inexpensive. The same politicians and pundits that are running away from their pre-war certitude about Iraq are careful not to rule out a war against Iran. The ones with 20-20 long distance vision muse about war with China, as if its inevitable.
America needs a peace movement that is most active during peacetime. What we have now is a go-to-war movement that considers peacetime to be merely a prepratory interlude for the next war.
A few pairs of Danish boots have also come home in a box, from Iraq and Afghanistan as well.
Jeeze, what a waste of lives all the way around -- and 2007 may end up being yet another bumper crop, words to express my disgust fail me.
Don't forget to add in mercenaries and contractors.
It would be interesting to hear how many mercenaries like Blackwater are over there now and their rate of employment over time. How much are we supplementing our forces privately? Are we becoming more like the Roman and British empires? Or are even these companies getting out of the area?
As Prof. Cole said, 3000 obscures so many. And of course the number is symbolic insofar as it's just a round number. The number of Iraqi casualties is far far far beyond obscene; the damage to the psyche of a country which will have to deal with its acquiescence to thugs and manipulators (the US), while some will distort George Bush's culpabiility and attempt to fob it off on others when the blood is on him, will be incalculable. And it's going to continue to get worse some, during 2007, before it gets better. Until Bush admits this is a colossal fug-up (pardon my French Dr. Cole), there's no resolution, or even beginning to address the scope of the catastrophe. As long as Bush continues to soft-pedal and politicize the responsibility and results, there's no coming to terms with the scope of this horror. And of course the Middle East and Iraq in particular have to bear much more than we in the States do. We have to end this war now.
Alamaine, I'm not exactly sure what your point was, but it is a mistake to compare casualties in Iraq with motor vehicle fatalities in the US. Yes, many more people die from car accidents in the US than are killed in Iraq--but 300 million people live in the US!! (plus there are many visitors, tourists). There are fewer than 200,000 US troops in Iraq. 1000 annual deaths out of 170,000 troops can't be compared to 40,000 traffic deaths out of a population of 300 million!!! my guess it's a bit more dangerous, as a matter of statistics, to be a soldier on patrol in Iraq than to drive on a US highway. and by "a bit" I mean "a lot"
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