Melville Cooke
Melville Cooke
EVENTS OVERTOOK one of the two morning dailies on Wednesday. A story which put the death count of American soldiers in Iraq as nearing the 1,000 mark was wrong by the time Kingston's streets were choked with morning traffic. An Internet story I checked about 8:00 a.m. informed ("four minutes ago" to boot) that the death count of United States soldiers in Iraq since March 2003 when, against massive protests around the world - including in the U.S. - Bush and company started the war, was 1003. And all but 138 of those deaths have come since Bush announced major combat was over on May 1, 2003. Now, there are lies, damn lies and statistics. This figure of 1003 (which should rise by the time this article is published) is all three of them.
SERVICE OF FREEDOM
First of all, it does not mean that (to use the Fox News jargon) "1000 brave Americans have given their lives in the service of freedom". Many of them have been killed as the natural result of an aggressive, colonising force being resisted - as it should. Furthermore, do not assume that what the story called U.S. 'military deaths' have all been the result of Iraqis resisting invasion and occupation, as is their duty (according to the U.S. Declaration of Independence).
If a U.S. soldier is driving along the road, hits a hole, his or her Humvee turns over and, unlike Beenie Man, he does not rise again, he is added to the casualty list. If a soldier decides that enough is enough and offs him or herself, by grenade, gunshot or whatever elegant method, it is termed U.S. casualty. And there have been many suicides by U.S. soldiers in Iraq. Ironically, there is a damn lie within the damn lie which would push the death count further up. The U.S. soldiers which off themselves after coming back home are not counted. There are people like Jeremy Seeley, whose death was part of a story in The Guardian in March. The story read:The Jeremy Seeley who went off to war was a man his grandfather remembers as tender-hearted. When Specialist Seeley returned from Iraq, he could not bring himself to tell his mother he was home, or even to hear her voice, leaving two disjointed messages on her answering machine but no contact number. On January 13 he walked out of the 101st Airborne base at Fort Campbell, Kentucky, checked into a motel room, and put a Do Not Disturb sign on the door. The police discovered his body four days later, along with containers of household poison. Seeley was 28.
SORROWS
It went on to speak of another soldier, 36-year-old William Howell, who killed himself with a shot to the head on March 13, using the gun he had chased his wife around their garden with to end his sorrows. These killings are not a part of the statistics. The Internet story that reported the 1003 deaths meandered a bit before it got to the Iraqi side of the equation the side that really matters. The Iraqis were given all of two paragraphs in the story:
The U.S. military has not reported overall Iraqi deaths. The Iraqi Health Ministry started counting the dead only in April when heavy fighting broke out in Fallujah and Najaf. However, conservative estimates by private groups place the Iraqi toll at least 10,000 - or 10 times the number of U.S. military deaths. "It is difficult to establish the right number of casualties," said Amnesty International's Middle East spokeswoman, Nicole Choueiry. She added that "it was the job of the occupation power to keep track of the numbers but the Americans failed to do so".
CONFLICTING STATISTICS
That failure is, of course, part of a deliberate strategy by the U.S. to discount the number of Iraqi civilians it murders. Nothing speaks as strongly as an exact figure; nothing puts an issue in doubt as much as an estimated figure or, worse, conflicting statistics. A ratio of 10 to one, as it stands by the estimate, is extremely low. Let us not forget that after four mercenaries were killed in Fallujah earlier this year, the U.S. responded by slaughtering 600 civilians. Work out the ratio. The US can put only so many Iraqis desperate for work that have been recruited in the supposed new police force between themselves and the people who are rightfully resisting the occupation. Their body count, inflated and all, will continue to rise. And the Iraqi death toll, under-reported and all, will continue to skyrocket. And a culture that seams generally not to understand anything they cannot eat, buy, screw or shoot, will never comprehend that they have already lost our hearts, minds and their 'war'.
Melville Cooke is a freelance writer.