After U.S. forces in Iraq crushed coordinated ambushes Sunday in the anti-American stronghold of Samarra, there came what one senior U.S. military official called a “conscious change in policy.” No longer would the military refrain from issuing an estimate of enemy dead.
“We’ve been killing and capturing bushels of these guys, but no one was talking about it,” the official told the Los Angeles Times. “For a while there it was beginning to look like only Americans were being killed.”
Inevitably, the mention of enemy dead brought forth comparisons to Vietnam, when the oft-touted yardstick of success, Vietcong body counts, turned out to have little to do with winning or losing the war.
The comparison to Vietnam may be inevitable–some people seem to relish the word “quagmire.” And surely the goal here is a stable, peaceful Iraq, not the maximum number of Iraqi dead.
And yet, there’s something a little ridiculous about muzzling military officials in the field regarding the scope and intensity of fighting. Accounting for the dead and injured on both sides of a conflict would seem a routine calculus of war.
A downside of specificity became clear almost immediately after Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt, during a news briefing, put the number of Iraqi insurgents killed at 54. Local Iraqis disputed the figure, claiming it was fewer than 10 and included civilians. Putting a hard number on enemy dead opened up a pointless, distracting debate that in some eyes damaged the credibility of U.S. troops.
From a strategic standpoint, though, there may be some benefit to calling attention to war dead. Saddam Hussein’s bitter-enders and those who might be tempted to travel to Iraq to join the opposition ought to know the risk and result of attacking U.S. troops. Unlike Vietnam, there is no great power providing aid and arms to the enemy. In the case of Iraq, there is likely to be a limited number of people willing to fight for what Iraqis call the “ex-regime.” (Not, interestingly, the “resistance” or any other grand word that would suggest an animating ideology beyond venal loyalty to Hussein.)
Battles on the ground always become fodder in the war for public opinion. No purpose is served by hiding the human toll of armed conflict. So, tell us the count.
The real indicators of success in the future will be measured differently, in the form of oil revenues, economic growth, and the vote totals when Iraqis get the chance to choose who will govern them.
