Friday, December 15, 2006

Body Counts

There's a front-page DailyKos post about the apparent return of body counts as a metric of our success in Iraq. In a press conference a couple of days ago Bush said:
Our commanders report that the enemy has also suffered. Offensive operations by Iraqi and coalition forces against terrorists and insurgents and death squad leaders have yielded positive results. In the months of October, November, and the first week of December, we have killed or captured nearly 5,900 of the enemy.

I'm old enough to remember listening to the Vietnam war body count on the nightly TV news, and even as boy I knew enough to realize that if were really killing Viet Cong at that rate the war would have ended long before. So either we were killing civilians and counting them as enemy soldiers, or the government was just making shit up. Turns out both were true back then, and probably still are.

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