The talk of the cable networks and the blogosphere today is the number four thousand, as in four thousand American troops killed in Iraq. Building upon a previous Situation post, I'd like to submit a few other numbers for your perusal:
- 135- The number of journalist fatalities in Iraq
- 308- Non-American military coalition forces
- 1,001 plus- Non-military contractors
- 8,057 or more- Iraqi security forces
- 15,000-45,000- Iraqi military personnel
- 1,000,000 plus- Iraqi civilians
I'm getting these numbers from an
Open Left post, which includes sources. Chris Bowers, the post's author, continues:
Also, keep in mind that these are just deaths, and damage has been done in many other ways. Nearly four million are now refugees, roughly 16% of the population, 40% of the middle class, and larger percentages of religious and ethnic minorities. Between 60% and 70% of Iraqi children suffer from psychological trauma. Tens of thousands of American soldiers, and hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians, have been injured. And oh yeah, the war will cost more than two trillion dollars.
Not that the 4,000-marker isn't horribly sad, but the addition of a few other numbers certainly puts it in perspective.
4 comments:
That last number. Wow. Spreading a very special brand of freedom, indeed.
But Americans are "trained" to respond to the number of Americans who were killed. I'm struck every time there is some sort of natural disaster in another country. The news coverage of the disaster almost always begins with "In Rhetorical Situation-Land, a major earthquake struck downtown today, killing X number of Americans. Oh, and yes, infinitely more Rhetorical Situationers were also killed." You would think that the larger number would be more newsworthy, but in our country it rarely is.
What disturbs me is the use of the 4000 American dead as justification for leaving Iraq; the alarming numbers of Iraqi civilians dying, displaced, wounded, etc. suggest a critical need to stabilize the country -- something our government has promised to do but has yet to accomplish.
I'm deeply disturbed by Bush's attempts to justify the deaths by saying that one day the new "freedom" and middle eastern peace is worth the loss of so many lives--as though either of those objectives have been or can be achieved.
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