Numbers do count

This morning's papers contained stories about the US total number of casualties in the war in Iraq exceeding 3000. That is at least a psychological milestone. But one wonders why the stories, like the one in the Sacramento Bee (Grim tally of the dead), covered the total in the way that they did. (NYT - 3000 dead in Iraq, countless tears at home; Washington Post - US Toll in Iraq reaches 3000 - in an increasingly violent conflict; The LA Times described it as a "grim milestone") This is not in any way to diminish the real sacrifice that American troops have made to date. The volunteers who are serving our country are heroic.

There are two important facts that should go into this discussion. The first, cited by a lot of supporters of the war, is that casualties in this war are small compared to others in our history. Indeed the numbers in Iraq a dwarfed by other major conflicts. The two American conflicts where the US had fewer casualties than the current war were the Gulf War (760 and 148 killed in action) and the Spanish American War (where we had 4108 casualties but 385 killed in action). There are a lot of problems with trying to compare casualties between wars. Casualties to disease was a major portion of total deaths on the battlefield in our early history and the technology of war has changed in significant ways. Indeed, this is one of our longest wars (Depending on when you date our involvement, Vietnam was longer) so comparisons are even less appropriate. Added to that is a little noticed story about rates of casualties. December was a terrible month for US forces, but the trendline in this conflict is down not up. In 2006 we had something less than 30 fewer casualties than we did in 2005. The major papers failed to cover that.

What bothers me about these stories is their failure to put the issues of this war into a broader context. The Bush administration has portrayed this war as an attempt to curtail terrorist activities in a broad scale. In essence they believe that by defeating the insurgents in Iraq that the causes of terrorists will be mitigated significantly if not defeated. The opponents look at this only in the context of this conflict. They believe we should not have gone into Iraq. But if one listens carefully to most of them, they also probably have no long term policy context for their pronouncements save the political ones. There are good reasons to discuss whether the broader goals of the Bush policies are appropriate or realistic. As the posthumous interview of President Ford suggested, there are several thoughtful individuals who believed that we should have finished the campaign in Afghanistan before moving on to other areas. But the papers concentrate on details without context.

There are some thoughtful observers who have suggested that in order to make the best policy on Iraq that we will need some additional troops for a limited period of time. Those suggestions may not be considered carefully enough because of the constant commentary about the number of battle deaths out of context. I am by nature naturally skeptical of many military assessments. I remember too clearly the pronouncements by Westmorland and others about how to win the war in Vietnam. At the same time I am also skeptical of political pronouncements - one could have looked at the members of the Baker Commission and come up with their conclusions before their first meeting. So context here is not only important, it is critical. The crux of the discussion here should be on reliable alternatives.

Democratic systems always have a problem in dealing with a war, no matter how good the cause. The constant harping on our battlefield losses does not improve our ability to make the right judgments about where we should go.