Thus far, 2,217 U.S. soldiers have been blown apart, shot or burned to their death in Iraq, and the Sisyphean effort they died for has sapped the national treasury of $230 billion. Yet pacification seems far off. Is our mission in Iraq worth the blood caused by our bombs?
Even if one answers 'yes,' other uncomfortable questions arise. What is the cost to Iraq? How many civilians have the insurgents killed? How many have we? Concern over Iraqi civilian deaths is not a nervous tick of liberal bleeding hearts. It concerns all Americans paying taxes for this foreign adventure: Our effort to democratize Iraq depends upon our impact on its people. Right now, our impact is precisely that of a 2,000 lb. JDAM bomb.
In Philadelphia five weeks ago, President Bush estimated that 30,000 civilians had died. But that number is perplexing given the scale of the air war campaign. It should not be surprising, then, that there are wildly different estimates of Iraqi casualties from both government and non-government sources.
Oddly enough, the Pentagon and the President issued incongruent figures. In October 2005, the Pentagon estimated that insurgents alone killed or wounded 26,000 Iraqi civilians in a 14 month period beginning January 2004. Did President Bush include that number in his own estimate? A non-government source based on media reports, IraqBodyCount.net, roughly matches the president's number, though the same anomalies apply. In the British medical journal Lancet, Johns Hopkins University researchers concluded that 100,000 Iraqi civilians had been killed through 2004.
Regardless, our media has accepted the estimate of 30,000 dead. Coincidentally, according to USAF Lt. General T. Michael Moseley's recently unclassified Operation Iraqi Freedom analysis, that number nearly exactly matches the 29,199 bombs and missiles dropped upon or launched at Iraqi targets from March 18th to April 18th 2003 (though it comes considerably short of the 300,000 30mm cannon rounds our troops fired during those same four weeks).
However accurate our bombs are, they still cause widespread destruction. For instance, U.S. warplanes dropped 5,086 separate GBU-31 JDAM bombs in Iraq during the four weeks of shock and awe. Each weighed 2,000 lbs. Anyone within 120 meters of that bomb's blast is turned into hamburger'transported to an environment where pressure is several thousand pounds per square inch, and the temperature reaches 8500 degrees Fahrenheit, the atmosphere is filled with supersonic metal shards. The Pentagon considers these 'pin-point' munitions because they're guided by $18,000 tail kits.
We also dropped 1,208 cluster bombs'large canisters which scatter anti-personnel sub-munitions (dozens of small bombs) that upon detonation saturate the target area in lethal storms of metallic splinters. Finally, it is unknown how many 750 lb. MK 77 Mod 5 firebombs were used because the Pentagon has only reluctantly admitted employing such controversial weapons (napalm is no longer used by many countries). Upon release, these drums of jellied fuel tumble, burst and scatter a chemical fire that has the peculiar trait of adhering like glue to human flesh.
That was the first four weeks of the war. We are now well into the third year of a continuous air war. It should be remembered that most bombs and missiles are dropped upon and launched at cities, towns and villages'we are not targeting old Soviet tanks buried in the desert, but rather insurgents buried in civilian populations.
While the first month of the war was particularly intense in terms of the number of combat sorties, which are air combat missions, our pilots have flown hundreds of combat sorties every month since. For example, U.S. military sources acknowledge at least 996 sorties flown over Iraq in November 2005. Given the fact that an ongoing air campaign targets urban areas, are we to conclude that the United States is dropping thousands of bombs on inhabited areas'??but averaging far less than one civilian death per strike'while the insurgents are slaughtering civilians by the thousands with homemade car bombs? Unlikely.
Maddeningly, our impact upon Iraq's civilian population has been grim. No more Saddam, but nearly three years later we are still dropping bombs.
The fact that we and the insurgents have killed many Iraqi civilians in this strange war for their freedom is depressing'not exactly what we like to read, hear or think about. But, it's also depressing (and wrong) to feign ignorance.
