The Body Bag Counter

A good barometer of the propaganda in action is the way US military deaths are reported. Here is a curious example where a fatality has been reclassified. On August 20th CentCom issued the following communiqué (abridged, emphasis added):

August 20, 2003 Release Number: 03-08-40
ONE KILLED, ONE INJURED AFTER CONVOY FIRED UPON BAGHDAD, Iraq – One 3rd Corps Support Command soldier was killed and another injured in a two-vehicle accident while driving south on the main supply route southeast of the town of Ad Diwaniyah.
The soldiers were driving in a supply convoy of Palletized Loading System vehicles when they received small arms fire and struck anothervehicle. […]
Security, medical and recovery assets were dispatched to the scene. One soldier died as a result of the accident.

A day later DefenseLink issued the following confirmation notification (abridged, emphasis added):

Aug 21, 2003 DefenseLink No. 613-03
DoD Identifies Army Casualty. The Department of Defense announced today that Spc. Kenneth W. Harris, Jr., 23, […] was killed on Aug. 20 in Scania, Iraq. Harris was fatally injured in a two-vehicle accident while driving south on the main supply route. Another soldier was also injured in the incident.

Presto! A combat death magically becomes an accidental death so the American and British media will not need to include this victim in their body count tallies. One only wonders what the family of the victim will think of this reclassification.

Given that there is obvious deception in the admission of US-uk fatalities, it is therefore salutary to view the post-May 1st body bag chart. For some reason no major news organization publishes this, although a public attuned to stock charts should have no trouble interpreting it. CNN and BBC have a tendency of focusing on the latest victims to the exclusion of a more general trend.

The data used to generate the graph below are different from that used by most media networks[1]. It includes: (i) soldier fatalities in so-called accidents – it is highly likely that many accidents were actually due to hostile action; and (ii) civilians working for the military -- at present there are one British and one American in this category[2]. It excludes: (i) foreign soldiers, and civilians working for NGOs, e.g., the UN. It also excludes foreign nationals who have been deliberately targeted, e.g., the Jordanian embassy -- there are very good reasons to add such fatalities, but the available data are limited; (ii) non-Iraqi paramilitary personnel hired by the "security" companies. These companies are increasingly assuming an important role in Iraq; they provide the mercenaries who will replace some functions of theUS-UK forces[3].

From May 1st, the official American declaration of an end to the war and the start of the occupation, until August 31st, there have been 166US-UK fatalities; it is an average of 1.3 per day over this period. The trend of the fatalities is up and it currently stands at 1.6 per day. At the projected rates, the forecast for the total number of US-uk deaths between May 1st and December 31st is about 378.

To put these numbers into perspective, one must realize that most US patrols have been scaled down, and at present, most military personnel remains within military compounds. Mercenaries are also taking over duties at checkpoints, something formerly done by US personnel. These days Gurkhas are prominent among the guards around Baghdad airport. Even with this lower profile the death rate is still rising. In other words, the resistance to the occupation is becoming fiercer.

Finally, for the color of the bodies in the US-UK casualty list, see the following table:

Post May 1: US-UK body colors

Race/ethnic Group Number %White 108 65Afro-origin 20 12Hispanic 16 10Other 2 1NA 20 12

And now the elections…

Now that the US election campaign is moving into full swing, the propagandists will seek to hide all the unpalatable aspects of the occupation of Iraq. There will be attempts to stoke the usual fears of terrorism or remind the American public about 9-11 (hence the recent release of the transcripts; see[2]. At the same time, everything will be done to quash references to the mounting American death toll, to the generalized shambles that Iraq finds itself in, and the opprobrium around the world that this occupation has brought upon the US.

With an election campaign in the offing, it is a time for a sober assessment of what Shrub (as the inimitable Texan commentator, Molly Ivins, likes to refer to Bush Jr.) and the scheming neocons have done for America. Clarity in terms of the number of soldiers killed, and the reasons for the opposition to theUS-UK troops, is important when evaluating America’s foreign policy and the performance of the Bush regime. One would hope that our American friends would gain some deeper understanding of the motivation of their rulers and the way they are being manipulated. Bush recently stated: "Retreat in the face of terror would only invite further and bolder attacks. There will be no retreat." Perhaps Americans may well ponder the meaning of this – endless wars, mounting US soldier body bags, massive budget deficits, further erosion of civil liberties, and ever more deception flung at the people of the United States.

Paul deRooij is a writer living in London. This article is a follow up on TheParade of the Body Bags.

Notes

[1] For a more detailed discussion of the data used here see my: The Parade of the BodyBags, ff. 2.

[2] The American civilian was an interpreter accompanying US troops. An American soldier who just returned from Iraq confirmed that the interpreters he saw also wore a camouflage uniform, so it is odd to class them as civilians and not count them.

[3] US-UK implies that they are equal partners in this war and occupation. However, the UK provided less than 10% of the armed forces for the war and the occupation. The UK participation is minimal, and therefore the designation US-uk conveys the relative weighting of the contribution of the principal members of the "coalition".