Unnamed, Unnoticed

By Judith Coburn, Tomdispatch.com. Posted July 19, 2005.

How many Iraqis have died in our war in their country? Is there a better symbol of how the war for Iraq has already been lost than our ignorance about the cost of the war to Iraqis?

"Cost of the war": a cliché to normalize the carnage, like the anaesthetizing term "collateral damage" and that new semantic horror, "torture lite." And yet the "cost of the war" report, by now a hackneyed convention of American journalism, includes only American casualties -- no Iraqis -- itself a violation of the American mainstream media's own professed commitment to "objectivity." Three years of "anniversary" articles in the American media adding up the so-called "cost of the war" in Iraq have focused exclusively on Americans killed, American dollars spent, American hardware destroyed, with barely a mention of the Iraqi dead as part of that "cost."

The dead are counted. But they are Americans. The names are named. But they are Americans. The names and numbers of the dead are intoned aloud or their photographs papered on media "walls" and they are always only American.

Publishing or pronouncing the names of the American dead everyday without ever mentioning the names of the Iraqi dead offers a powerful message that only American dying matters. In Indochina, during the years I covered that war, we counted but didn't name Americans. That wasn't done until after the war was over. We never counted and never named the Vietnamese, Cambodian, and Lao dead. Still today, though the estimates run into the millions, there is no reliable count of how many Indochinese died or were hurt in our war there. Not to mention El Salvador, Nicaragua, Panama, Haiti, and the First Gulf War.

But there's no way to count, protest American journalists. What they mean is that the Pentagon doesn't count for them -- "We don't do counts," was the way General Tommy Franks put the matter during our Afghan war. But Iraq Body Count (IBC) counts as does the Brookings Institute among others. As of July 13, IBC estimated Iraqi civilian casualties to be between 22,838 and 25,869, an extremely conservative number. (The range between the two figures represents occasional discrepancies in the number of civilian casualties reported by different media sources about the same incident). So what journalists really mean is that only Pentagon counting counts and that the prosecutor of the war is the only "reliable" source on the magnitude of its own killing. Pentagon casualty figures are rarely questioned. When anyone else counts, these figures are given short shrift.

Who Counts

The alternative media, bloggers included, have seized on Gen. Franks' words with outrage. But the fact is the Pentagon does count. It just doesn't care to add those dead bodies up, let alone tell the American public or the rest of the world how many dead Iraqis there have been or how many more are being killed at this very moment. In Iraq, as in Vietnam and the first Gulf war, every unit of the American military must file "after action" reports about any "contact" with the enemy. Most of these include injuries and deaths to civilians (even if these are often counted as enemy-soldier deaths to cover them up, a practice the media eventually exposed in Vietnam, but has not yet explored in Iraq). Also, any injury or death of a suspected civilian is supposed to be reported in a separate "incident" report. "We do keep records of innocent civilians who are killed accidentally by coalition force soldiers," Brig. Gen. Mark Hertling, assistant commander for the First Armored Division, told New York Times reporter Jeffrey Gettleman last year. "And, in fact, in every one of those innocent death situations, we conduct internal investigations to determine what happened."

The military also has a compensation program for victims injured or killed by American soldiers under the Foreign Claims Act. The bar for qualifying for this program is absurdly high -- the victim must know and be able to prove which specific military unit injured or killed her or his relative, have a claim form filled out by that unit admitting its responsibility, have two witnesses and produce copies of medical reports, not to mention being willing in the first place to approach the very forces who inflicted the suffering. Compensation is apparently approved for only 50% of those who get up the nerve to file for it. But the military does at least have figures on how many Iraqis have been compensated, which it has refused to release, even to Vermont Senator Patrick Leahy, who requested them. CNN, Newsday, the Associated Press, and the Christian Science Monitor have managed to ferret out a partial count: the Pentagon doled out $2.2 million to Iraqis between May, 2003 and February, 2004 with 5,700 out of 11,300 cases approved. (But since such compensation includes damage to property and people wounded as well as killed, this figure doesn't translate into numbers of civilian casualties).

Journalist Judith Coburn has covered war and its aftermath in Indochina, Central America, and the Middle East for the Village Voice and the New York Times.

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