Iraq War: Body counts

"I think we are winning.  Okay?  I think we're definitely winning.  I think we've been winning for some time." - Gen. Richard Myers, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, on the Iraq War 04/26/05

"I just wonder if they will ever tell us the truth." - Harold Casey, Louisville, KY, October 2004.

Joseph Galloway is thinking about the significance of  The return of the body count Knight-Ridder 10/26/05.

One important lesson [of the Vietnam War] was that using enemy body counts as a metric of success corrupts the system and makes liars out of soldiers and officers.

The high command in Saigon in those long-ago days seized on a strategy of attrition - we will kill far more of them than they kill of us - and then to prove the efficacy of their fatally flawed strategy demanded body counts every time gunfire erupted in the jungle.

GIs ordered to comb the gloom of a battlefield counting bodies joked that they would, at times, tally up the arms and legs and divide by four. Whatever number they reported often grew like Jack's beanstalk as it climbed the chain of command.

That led to straight-faced colonels at the daily press briefing in Saigon, dubbed, not without cause, the "Five O'Clock Follies," reporting that 96 enemy were killed by body count, and 12 weapons were recovered.

And this system of body counts in turn led to gross mistakes in intelligence evaluations.  The basic data - number of enemy killed - were nearly worthless.

But the Pentagon has taken to using them again in the Iraq War.  And, not surprisingly, the same perverse results are occuring as in the Vietnam War:

So what do the Iraq numbers mean? Well, last year American commanders estimated that there were no more than 5,000 active insurgents in Iraq.

Those same commanders have reported that some 1,300 insurgents have been killed since the end of January 2005 and another 8,260 have been detained.

But wait! Before you declare the war over, consider this: Gen. John Abizaid, the head of the U.S. Central Command, said on Oct. 2 that he estimates that there now are 20,000 insurgents.

So let's do a little math: Five thousand insurgents minus 1,300 killed equals 3,700 left. Minus 8,260 insurgents captured. Equals 20,000 insurgents still out there.

But the generals, and the Republican politicians who pride themselves on "supporting the military" by sending it on a disastrous and impossible mission like the Iraq War, will tell us that public support for the war has dropped because of poor media reporting.  No, the bigger problem is what the Pentagon is reporting.  Lies and more lies.

Jules Witcover has been noticing the same thing: Not Vietnam Redux? Tribune Media Services 10/26/05.

The latest reminder of Vietnam in the Iraq war is the recent U.S. military's resort to body counts as a measure of progress. As the American forces and their Iraqi soldier-trainees are moving against the insurgents, the military headquarters are increasingly reporting how many have been killed.

This is in spite of Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld's saying on television two years ago that "we don't do body counts on other people." But Gen. George Casey, the U.S. commander in Iraq, last January said the combined American and Iraqi forces had killed or captured 15,000 of the enemy in the previous year.

Witcover also takes note of the fact that the domestic opposition to the Iraq War has grown much more quickly than that against the Vietnam War:

One difference this time around is that the American public appears to be stirring in protest much earlier than it did in the Vietnam war. The United States was involved to one degree or another in the war in Southeast Asia for at least a decade before Americans started taking to the streets in huge numbers against it. Just a month ago, Washington saw its largest anti-war demonstration since the end of the Vietnam war.

In his final paragraph, he writes:

Some diehard critics of Bush continue to muse about impeaching him on grounds he took the country to war on flawed intelligence or deception. But it is very late for such a step, as warranted as they think it may be.

The casual reader of his column might not be aware of what he wrote this summer in his goodbye column from the Baltimore Sun:

I wrote then that there was a more realistic vehicle for expressing public disfavor - the approaching 2004 presidential election. I argued that those who were against the war could use the election as a referendum on what I argued was an illegal war begun under false premises.

Many voters obviously did so, but not enough, in part because the Bush campaign succeeded in making Democratic nominee John Kerry, himself ambiguous on the war, and his Vietnam service record the issue rather than the man who had started that war. In retrospect, I lament not having advocated impeachment, even as achieving it was unlikely.

In an article of 05/23/05, Tom Engelhardt (The Return of the Body Count: Or the Metrics of Losing TomDispatch.com):

Numbers, "metrics," ways of measuring success are now multiplying in Iraq. This in itself is a measure of frustration. Victory seldom needs metrics. Okay, maybe once upon a time, quantifiable loot and slaves mattered; more recently, the metric of victory was territory conquered - and when American troops reached Baghdad and the Bush administration thought its war a raging success, no metrics were necessary.

Our iconic metric of war, which also proved a measure of a losing war, was, of course, the body count which we associate with Vietnam. The body count was, however, an invention of the later years of the Korean War, a way of measuring "success" once the two sides had settled into the bloodiest of stalemates and the taking of significant territory - in fact, the wild movements of armies up and down the Korean peninsula - had become a thing of the past. In a sense, the body count, aka "the meat-grinder," was from its inception both a measure of nothing and a measure of frustration. ...

In our new [post-Vietnam War] world of conflict, where our leaders had imbibed all the "lessons" of Vietnam, Centcom's Gen. Tommy Franks, then commander of our Afghan War (now on the board of Outback Steakhouse, which donated shrimp and steak dinners to our troops in Afghanistan), declared that "we don't do body counts." ...

Think of this, then, as a Tomdispatch rule of war (American-style): In place of genuine victory or actual success, metrics multiply. So the next time you see the word "metrics" or a new set of figures being publicly kicked around to prove our "success" in Iraq, just assume that further problems (and yet more frustration) have arisen.

"Wars are easy to get into, but hard as hell to get out of." - George McGovern and Jim McGovern 06/06/05