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Iraq: hidden casualties as policy: the toll of death, injury and madness in Iraq is being vastly underestimated as a reflection of the privatisation of war and the militarisation of the media.

Article Excerpt
The Gruesome Tally

In Fahrenheit 9/11, director Michael Moore steers a difficult course between highlighting some of the questionable practices of the US military, and the impact of the war on combat troops. Moore makes plain the fact that the war has enveloped Iraqi combatants and civilians as well as US troops in a grisly affair fought for the most dubious of motives. The resulting pain and suffering has been borne chiefly by the people of Iraq. According to organizations like Iraqi Body Count, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, International Physicians Against Nuclear War, and the Washington-based Centre for Defence Alternatives, between 7000 and 12,000 civilians have been killed since March 2003, and about three times that number injured, often seriously. Up to 15,000 Iraqi combatants perished as a result of the 2003 invasion and the bloodletting continues with frequent clashes between US troops and 'insurgents' in and around cities like Baghdad, Falluja and Basra.

For the US military and political leadership, the most sensitive statistic of all is the US body count. As I write (early September 2004), the aggregate number of US troops killed in Iraq since March 2003, according to official US sources, had topped 1,000. This solitary figure, however, is only a small part of a very complex story of the US casualties. While such a bald statistic touches a very raw nerve in the American psyche--evoking the horrors of the Vietnam war--it also reflects an empirical practice that is steeped in doubt, distortion, obfuscation and cover-up.

The US administration has not only attempted to keep prying public eyes from the returned coffins of dead American soldiers, it has also created an elaborate way of concealing the real cost of the war in terms of the dead and injured. This is perhaps understandable. After all, a gleeful US President Bush announced the 'end of hostilities' in May 2003 and he and his colleagues certainly did not want the public to know the scale of the catastrophe that had befallen an increasingly demoralized US force in Iraq. The fact is that the aggregate index of death to...

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