The Politics of Body Counting

It's hard fighting a war in the age of a mass media, especially one that sees impartiality as one of its primary virtues. Yet to ignore some facts and focus on others, as the media does, is in fact a form of partiality, but a more subtle one than simply presenting your own opinion. I'm thinking particularly of the media's obsession with the number of American soldiers who have died in Iraq. Several times over the last year, I have spent an hour or so searching the Web in vain for an estimate of the number of insurgents killed. It really struck me as odd that such a figure was so difficult to find. Of course, there's no doubt that it's more difficult to estimate, but the US military has provided enough estimates of insurgents killed at various engagements that it would at least be possible to come up with a rough figure. The Brookings Institute provides an estimate of the number of "neutralised" insurgents in its fascinating, regularly updated Iraq Index , but no distinction is made between those killed and those captured. Is it really necessary to be reminded of the number of Americans killed in the war every time there is a new casualty? Is it really impartial when there is no similar attempt to tally the number of insurgent dead?

As awful as the death of even one American soldier is, the death rate in the Iraq War is actually extremely low. The combat death rate -- that is, the number of combat deaths per month or per year -- in the current war is lower than that in any other war America has fought except the War of Independence (and that is only because Washington et al. spent so much of the seven years of that war hiding from the British). It's become standard rhetoric recently to compare the war in Iraq to the Vietnam War, but during the worst year in Vietnam, 1968, the Americans lost around 15,000 troops in combat, whereas over the last 12 months in Iraq only about 700 Americans have been killed by the insurgents -- over 20 times fewer. During World War II, almost 300,000 Americans died in combat. For the number of combat deaths to reach that amount in Iraq, at the current death rate, the war would have to continue for another 500 years. (See table below for a comparison of the annual death rates of all the major wars America has fought.)

I believe that most Americans consider that the sacrifice made during World War II was worth it to defeat fascism in Europe and Japan. Is it not worth making a far, far smaller sacrifice to defeat fascism in the Middle East?

US military hostile deaths* during major wars
War	Total Deaths			Duration (yrs.)		Ann. Av.		Relative to Ann. Av. For Iraq War
Revolutionary War	4,435			7.6		584		X1.0
War of 1812	2,260			2.5		904		X1.5
Mexican War	1,733			1.4		1,223		X2.0
US Civil War	191,963			4.0		48,000		X80
Span. Am. War	385			0.3		1,155		X1.9
World War I	53,402			1.6		33,727		X56
World War II	291,557			3.7		77,750		X130
Korean War	33,741			3.0		11,250		X19
Vietnam War	47,369			7.5		6,315		X11
Gulf War	148			0.1		1,283		X2.1
Iraq War	1,430**			2.4		597		NA
*i.e. does not include deaths from accidents or disease.
**as at early August 2005