How many of the insurgents have we killed in Iraq? You might think it's a macabre question, but it's relevant to whether our excursion there was a good idea. After all, if we're not militarily effective, that would have some bearing on whether the war was just, and the lessons we learn from the Iraq phase of the War on Terror will affect future phases and future wars.
So who keeps track of enemy body counts? Not the military, not since the press decided to make that statistic the butt of jokes in Vietnam. Has the press kept count? Are you kidding? They'd have to get out of their air-conditioned offices and get their shirts all yucky with sweat, then scurry around a hostile area among thugs who don't really care if you're a journalist, just that you're a Westerner and fair game for beheading.
From the reporters who have actually bothered to explore the question, it would seem that American forces are creating something on the order of ten casualties for every one we take, and the ratio could be even higher. Nobody disputes that whenever there is an actual battle or skirmish, and the insurgents fight instead of slither away, they end up getting their clocks cleaned.
Which leads me to an even more pointed question: how many innocent people have these cowardly insurgents killed? They've blown up worshippers, shoppers, policemen, U.N. employees, a busload of schoolgirls...surely someone is keeping track, right? This number should be easy to find out, since there's little question that, say, Issa the mechanic was guilty of no crime when he was blown up while passing an electrical station.
But we have no idea how many innocent people have died from the thugs. The soon-to-be-disbanded Coalition Provisional Authority doesn't publish those stats. What about our left-wing "watchdog groups"? They say they're keeping track of innocent deaths, but that is not true. They only care about innocent deaths if they can be ascribed to the Coalition.
So when a car bomb blows up a few blocks away from the CPA headquarters, and kills three Iraqis, that doesn't count for the watchdogs, which are always saying they're anti-war, not anti-American. However, there are at least two sides to every war. Why are they only concerned about innocent deaths inadvertently caused by one side, and positively dismissive about innocent deaths deliberately caused by the other?
One is tempted to think that dead Iraqis only interest the hard Left when they can pin the blame on the people they hate. After all, they didn't seem overly concerened about dead Iraqis when Saddam was filling his mass graves. This isn't new. They got all weepy about dead Vietnamese civilians until the North took over the South and exterminated tens of thousands of them, and drove hundreds of thousands out of their homes. Where were the peaceniks then?
The Left uses the people of the Third World as props in their imaginary morality plays of the Big Bad West and the Poor, Exploited Darker People, but with honorable exceptions like Amnesty International, I have yet to see much evidence that they care about the actual people involved.
http://www.iraqbodycount.net/
This website only confirms Eric's point. It only lists deaths it claims are attributable "directly" to "military action by the US and its allies." Innocent civilians slaughtered or starved by Saddam Hussein apparently don't count, nor do the multiplying terrorist murders committed by insurgents.
Again, such innocent casualties don't fit into the leftist fantasy play of "Big Bad West and Poor Exploited Darker People." Eric's judgment applies here: it doesn't look like the writers of this website actually care about the people involved.
I love humanity....it's people I can't stand....I forgot who penned this great line....but it sure applies to the left.
Peter, I recall an article by a black conservative whose father told him, "Racists hate black people in general, but they're willing to give individual blacks a break. Liberals say they love black people, but they don't give a damn when they actually meet one." That seems to go along with your comment.
Jeff, I was thinking of that scurrilous site as I was typing that post, though there are others. Basically, they look in the press for casualty figures and tally the numbers. Often, the reporters don't see the number of dead, they rely on eyewitnesses, which are notoriously unreliable.
Also, how can you tell who is and is not a combatant? A dead insurgent thug looks like a civilian if somebody has taken their weapon, because he's not wearing a uniform and they don't issue Iraqi Insurgent ID card.
Eric,
That site is not definitive and there is no way to ever calculate the number of people killed done by Saddam (or in the Iraq wars).
I posted it because it's one number - perhaps it gives a ballpark. We know the number of people reported to be killed during the war is not 1 or 10 Million, but their number of about 10 thousand sounds in the ball park.
I repeat my question: how many have the insurgents killed? Because that will give us a good idea of how many they will kill if they gain power in Iraq. Just multiply the total by 10 or 20, and you'll be in the ballpark. The people who run the site don't care about that any more than the anti-Vietnam protestors cared about the concentration camps and mass executions in 1975.