Matt Watson is the opinion editor at The Reflector. He can be contacted at [email protected].One news piece that appeared quite often this Easter Sunday was the U.S. death toll in Iraq reaching the tragic 4,000 mark. Even as a close primary race is still waging and the media’s attention is preoccupied with that race, the number 4,000 has brought on a somber reflection of just how far we’ve come in the last five years.
But we shouldn’t let that numerical value alone define the cost of the war. Indeed, 4,000 U.S. deaths is only a fraction of the loss of human life this war has seen, and it is important for our leaders to realize that the loss of all life needs to be calculated into the cost of war.
“No casualty is more or less significant than another,” U.S. military’s spokesman in Iraq, Rear Adm. Gregory Smith, said, according to a CNN report. But he was referring only to U.S. troops.
His statement, although true, illustrates the current administration’s general obliviousness to the total loss of human life in Iraq. It highlights the unfortunate and, at the very core, inhumane manner in which Bush and his advisers have viewed the long conflict, with civilian deaths seen as collateral damage.
Of course, in any war there is collateral damage, but our government is responsible for determining just how many deaths are too many to withstand compared to the benefits of waging a conflict. It is my understanding that America’s leadership hasn’t done enough to gauge the costs versus the benefits.
This is evidenced by the fact that there is no official count of civilian loss in Iraq. As Gen. Tommy Franks notoriously commented before the 2003 invasion, “We don’t do head counts.” The untold thousands that have died in this five-year saga have coldly been unaccounted for.
Estimates vary greatly, the lowest figures being reported by the Iraq Body Count. The independent effort, which keeps tabs with hundreds of news reports, has estimated almost 90,000 casualties. Other efforts, such as the World Health Organization, have estimated more than 100,000. The medical journal The Lancet estimated more than 600,000.
People often choose an estimate depending on which side they’re on. For instance, President Bush opted for a 30,000 estimate during a speech in 2005. Although choosing that figure is understandable for the president, it isn’t very responsible.
With so many varying stories, why hasn’t our military effort tried from the beginning to guage a more accurate count of the dead? An outspoken report in The Guardian accused Bush of attempting to ensure that the damage of this conflict doesn’t too closely resemble Vietnam in the public eye. Otherwise, his success stories wouldn’t be as believable.
We shouldn’t let our attention be focused only on what our leaders want us to be focused on. A U.S. death toll of 4,000 is bad, but if we only look at that, those with power have succeeded in narrowing our focus quite a bit.
Whether the Iraqis have suffered 90,000 deaths or 600,000 deaths, the question the Bush administration has never wanted Americans to ask is whether the number of casualties, both American and Iraqi, was a hardship that was worth taking on.
Some say that the casualties of this war pale in comparison to wars past, such as World War II. I would like to remind them that this is a war that is not a war. It is a conflict in which our goals are becoming more unclear with each year. And not only has it taken a toll on human lives, but it has also hurt our nation’s economy and our reputation around the world. No, it was not worth it.