Crossposted from Left Toon Lane & My Left Wing
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Can we do the math anymore? Not if the administration and the Iraqi government has it’s way. There are moves afoot to ban reporters from bomb attack sites, stop publication of morgue statistics and continue the policy of discluding civilians in the causality numbers. Daily Kos Diarist BarbinMD has an excellent front page story on this very issue.
But there is another problem with the body count that I really don’t see being address in the mainstream media and that is the so-called surge. Are we really adding troops on the ground or is the real purpose of the surge is simply to replace the dead and the wounded? Yes, the death rate in Iraq is lower than Vietnam, but the number of critically wounded is historically high. So all those dead and wounded soldiers need to be replaced at some point. But do we really know?
With the BushCo propaganda machine in full swing against the Democrats, it is damn near impossible to find real data or troop exchanges. So I going on gut instinct here and say we are really just replacing troops lost in combat with just a tinge of new folks for the so-called surge.
This is a good time to review my “gut instinct” policy – under the Bush Administration, however bad things appear to be, in reality they are five times worse.
Your mileage may vary.
you have a very good point with your gut feeling. I have a feeling you are right.
My understanding is that we have higher numbers of critically wounded because we can save more lives now than we could in Vietnam — in Vietnam, those men would have added to the death rate, so it’s quite possible the overall casualty rate is not that different. We have no way of knowing, since (as you point out), the numbers of wounded, or those who die as a result of critical injuries off the battlefield, are not known. And the civilian casualty rate is horrific — car bombs in urban areas are indiscriminate killers, without regard for sect, tribal or political affiliations, age, gender, or anything else.
And if the true blood cost of this war were known, the pressure to end it all and bring the troops home would be even higher and louder than it is now — and quite likely would have peaked a lot sooner.
I doubt even the President knows the real casualty figures… he’s not a details-oriented kind of guy, or one that wants to hear bad news. I wonder, when he owned that baseball team, did he even keep track of THOSE statistics? Or did he just want to hear the total of winning games (and box office totals), and nothing more…?