It all adds up to something
ARE THE ANTIWAR protests getting you down, with all those pictures of empty boots lined up to symbolize the 1,911 (as of Friday) American soldiers killed in Iraq?
Don't be discouraged. A lot of bad guys are dead too.
According to Gen. Jack Keane, who recently retired as deputy chief of staff of the Army, the U.S. coalition killed or detained at least 50,000 insurgents in the first seven months of 2005. So I guess we're doing something right.
Granted, U.S. officials continue to tell us that the Iraqi insurgency really involves only a small number of people, maybe 16,000 insurgents, or at any rate "not more than 20,000." But this discrepancy is not important. Maybe we captured or killed some of them twice.
What's important is that we outnumber them -- 150,000 U.S. troops to 20,000 insurgents. Plus, we've got more firepower. The Government Accountability Office reports that we've used 1.8 billion rounds of small-caliber ammo in Iraq. Sure, skeptics say that if you work out the ratio of bullets fired to insurgents killed, it looks like our aim is not so great. But it's the thought that counts.
Besides, the "bad guy body count" is probably too low. All those suicide bombers should really be counted in our "dead insurgents" column too.
True, those dead bad guys have taken out lots of civilians with them. What with suicide bombings, improvised explosive devices, assassinations and so on, the Iraqi Interior Ministry estimates that from January 2004 to June 2005, insurgents managed to kill 12,000 Iraqi civilians. But that's not so special. We've taken out lots of civilians too, and we weren't even trying: According to the Oxford Research Group, U.S. forces have caused the deaths of more than 9,000 Iraqi civilians since the war began.
But hey, who's counting? Everyone knows you can play games with statistics. Public health researchers, writing in the medical journal Lancet, said in 2004 that the Iraq war had likely caused about "100,000 excess deaths" among Iraqi civilians. So which is it -- 12,000, 9,000 or 100,000? How can you trust numbers that are so all over the place?
Regardless, it's important to remember that we're not the only ones who know this is a war worth fighting. We have lots of friends in Iraq, and plenty of them are dead too, including at least 197 coalition troops and 3,173 Iraqi soldiers and police.
