How many dead?

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For that issue of how many Iraqis have been killed? Funny how they can dispute a simple count, isn't it?

But I remember when the more modest "estimate" of 10,000 dead would have meant something, even if NOT American lives.


T R U T H O U T

The Killing Fields

Way back in March 2002, then-Centcom Commander Tommy Franks, speaking of the Afghan dead in our recent war, famously said, "I don't believe you have heard me or anyone else in our leadership talk about the presence of 1,000 bodies out there, or in fact how many have been recovered… You know we don't do body counts." (At least in that distant year, there was still a fighting man implicitly ready to claim some memory of the "lessons" of Vietnam!)

Even as the Bush administration moved its operations forcefully to Iraq, which has since become a monster killing field, its officials, military and civilian, have remained consistent on this matter. The American dead are to be slipped home in the dead of night -- none of those disturbing Vietnam-era "body bags" in sight – and foreign "body counts" are out. No toting up of Iraqi bodies, no matter how many may be lying around or how civilian they might be.

Nonetheless, in a piece published last year in the British medical journal The Lancet, a group of researchers from Johns Hopkins University, Columbia University, and Al-Mustansiriya University in Baghdad did a household study of civilian deaths in Iraq (knocking on doors in 33 places in the country for almost 8,000 interviews, a dangerous task indeed). They estimated, based on their work, that somewhere around 100,000 Iraqi civilians, a majority of them women and children, had died due to the invasion and the ongoing occupation of the country and the insurgency. This study, for reasons well explained by Lila Guterman (Dead Iraqis) in the Columbia Journalism Review, was barely reported on in the American press, though the figures, approximate as they must be, are nonetheless probably conservative, or so concludes Guterman. Based on this study, it would not, she adds, be unreasonable to assume that in the five months since the paper came out, if "the death rate has stayed the same, roughly 25,000 more Iraqis have died."

Oh, one figure on the Iraqi and Afghan dead did come to light last week. One hundred and eight of them managed to die "in American custody," and "most of them violently, according to government data provided to The Associated Press. Roughly a quarter of those deaths have been investigated as possible abuse by U.S. personnel." This is assuredly but the tip of some iceberg or other.

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Here's a poem I want to share, from the sister of a fallen soldier

Have you ever heard the sound of a mother screaming for her son?
The torrential rains of a mother's weeping will never be done.
They call him a hero, you should be glad that he's one,
but have you ever heard the sound of a mother screaming for her son?
Have you ever heard the sound of a father holding back his cries?
He must be brave because his boy died for another man's lies.
The only grief he allows himself are long, deep sighs.
Have you ever heard the sound of a father holding back his cries?
Have you ever heard the sound of taps played at your brother's grave?
They say that he died so that the flag will continue to wave,
but I believe he died because they had oil to save.
Have you ever heard the sound of taps played at your brother's grave?
Have you ever heard the sound of a nation being rocked to sleep?
The leaders want to keep you numb so the pain won't be so deep,
but if we the people let them continue, another mother will weep.
Have you ever heard the sound of a nation being rocked to sleep?

For all our brothers in arms.