Why is it that I cannot find a figure for total terrorist/insurgent/regime casualties in Iraq? Why is it that any search for information on any casualties in Iraq, even when specified as "enemy" or "terrorist" comes up with thousands of coalition and US body counts? Why aren't we keeping track of how well we're actually doing in this war? A US casualty figure tells us nothing if we don't also have an enemy casualty figure. This is so absurd.
The closest thing to an enemy body count I can find is a summary of various casualty reports on Wikipedia. It gives estimates of anywhere from 4,895 to 124,000+. The fact that we can't even get a number within a few standard deviations is completely ridiculous. The Defense Department has got to have numbers, and they need to release them.
4 comments:
how "well" we're doing?
christ - i came over from your ignorant rampage on volokh in which you misidentify homosexuality and transgender as ethnicities (congratulations on offensiveness, by the by), only to find that you want a body count to determine how efficient our boys have gotten at killing iraqi civilians! your colonialism makes me ill.
awesome. rock on.
First of all, thanks for your comment, whether you agree or not.
Secondly, I wasn't using those sexual identities as ethnicities. I'm not stupid. I may not have worded it quite precisely, but I intended general minorities, not specifically ethnicity.
Thirdly, there are numerous body count estimates for Iraqi civilians. That was not my target, hence the qualifier "enemy". Civilians are not our enemy. Regime forces, terrorists, and insurgents are. Those are not civilians, nor should they be counted in civilian casualty estimates.
Fourthly, I am not a colonialist. While I have no problem with liberation, I have no desire to retain foreign territories for tribute to the mother country.
Fifthly, please identify yourself in comments. I'm not a fan of unaccountable and unreachable commenters. But I appreciate your thoughts.
The term "Colonialism" is not quite correct in this context. I believe you want "Imperialism," which isn't the same thing.
And personally, I like Imperialism. I don't see anything at all wrong with superior cultures conquering inferior ones, when the savages deserve to be conquered.
For example, I've sometimes heard ultra-Liberal morons whine about the conquest of the Americas by Europeans. They whine about the destruction of "advanced" civilizations like the Aztecs by the "bloodthirsty" Spaniards under Cortés — and they never seem to place any importance on the fact that the Aztecs were some of the most bloodthirsty bastards that ever walked this planet, engaging in human sacrifice on a scale that boggles the civilized mind.
Well, Cortés had the Aztecs to conquer, and we have the Iraqis — and the rest of the Muslim world too, for that matter. They are savages, and they deserve to be conquered. They deserve to be nothing more than a footnote in the pages of History.
While I agree that the historical conquest of the Americas by Europeans was perfectly defensible in the colonial times in which it occured, I don't necessarily agree that the indigenous societies "deserved" to be conquered. If they couldn't defend themselves, then it makes sense that they would be conquered, and no grudge can reasonably be held against the Europeans. The various pre-European American peoples conquered each other throughout their histories. They weren't immune from the same treatment by outsiders.
What we're doing in the Middle East is completely different, though. We're conquering despotic governments and giving the countries back to their people in the hopes that their new found freedom will turn some of them from their terrorist ways.
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