Letters to the Editor
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The Return of the Body Count
I take as one of the surest signs that we are loosing in Iraq to be the return of the ‘body count’ to military briefings. For the past four years US military commanders have scrupulously avoided the use of ‘body counts’ in describing the success of failure of military operations. This was to avoid the inevitable comparisons to Vietnam’s infamous ‘kill ratios’ and because most previous US commanders in Iraq (and even Rumsfeld, may he burn in hell) understood that ‘body counts’ are relatively meaningless, often misleading and come back to bite one in the ass when one learns that the ’20 insurgents’ killed were actually civilians or your own allies (a fact which is well documented in the reporting outside the US as Greenwald has previously noted).
The return of these ‘body counts’ over the last couple of months (the same time we started calling everyone we kill al-Qaeda) is the clearest sign that the Bush administration is getting desperate to show any kind of success. They can’t point to real political process, they can’t point to a decrease in violence, they can’t point to decreasing US casualties so they’re resorting to pointing to dead bodies on the ground and calling that ‘victory.’
What amazes me is that this shift in reporting from the Pentagon has gone virtually unnoticed by anyone in the media, including all the Vietnam era reports who should no better. The press latches on a reports these ‘body counts’ uncritically and without comment.