Down for the Count

According to the Washington Post, the Pentagon announced last Monday that it "has no plans" to count civilian casualties. Previously, U.S. officials expressed similar sentiments regarding Iraqi military casualties. "We do not look at combat as a scorecard," Captain Frank Thorp, chief military spokesman of Central Command, told the New York Times. "We are not going to ask battlefield commanders to make specific reports on enemy casualties."

While the Iraqi government was uncharacteristically tight-lipped regarding its military casualties, it did release information on civilians. On April 3rd, it provided its last count: Naji Sabri, the country's Foreign Minister, told Reuters that 1250 Iraqi civilians had been killed in the war, and over 5000 injured. Given that most of what the Iraqi government was officially proclaiming about the war made Ari Fleischer look like the world's most honest, candid man, such numbers were generally taken with a sandstorm of salt.

And yet, such contentions weren't wholly incredible. On April 6th, according to the Associated Press, the International Committee of the Red Cross revealed that "the number of casualties in Baghdad [were] so high that hospitals [had] stopped counting the number of people treated." A declaration like that should have inspired relentless media coverage of Iraqi casualty totals. Instead, media coverage of civilian casualties has actually been so scarce that even that kid from "The Sixth Sense" probably thinks that only anti-American buildings have perished in the conflict.

Ever since the war started, the most consistently updated source of Iraqi casualty information has been provided not by the professional media, but rather by an independent group of researchers who operate the website Iraqbodycount.net. Based in England, the site's core team of 19 contributors monitor media reports from dozens of newspapers and TV channels to, in its words, "establish an independent and comprehensive public database of media-reported civilian deaths in Iraq resulting directly from military actions by the USA and its allies in 2003." As of Tuesday, April 22nd, the site was reporting a minimum of 1878 civilian deaths, and a maximum of 2325.

Perhaps if the site's creators had thought to publish photographs of precision-dismembered Iraqi civilians on a deck of playing cards, Iraqbodycount.net would have received more attention. As it is, the number of press mentions it has gotten over the course of the war is fairly modest. On its busiest day during the conflict, the Iraqbodycount.net database page generated 74,887 page-views. But as Hamit Dardagan, principal researcher and site manager of Iraqbodycount.net, points out, "That's just the visitors to our own website." Iraqbodycount.net also created a series of "IBC webcounters" that other web publishers used to display the project's stats on their sites. "There are 600 websites who notified us that they had installed the counter, but this wasn't compulsory and we know there were others, probably a majority, who didn't notify us," Dardagan says. "How many web users therefore actually saw these countres is another calculation altogether."

Along with its fans, Iraqbodycount.net has attracted some critics too. In the Weekly Standard, Josh Chafetz writes about "the voodoo science of calculating civilian casualties," arguing that Iraqbodycount.net's methodology gives too much credence to Iraqi government sources. For example, if two media outlets simply reported that the Iraqi government had announced the deaths of 300 civilians in a particular incident, that incident would generate entries of "300" in both the "Minimum" and "Maximum" columns of the Iraqbodycount.net database, even if the media outlets stated that they were unable to verify the claims themselves.