The Body Count

The “body count” is a very bad way to assess progress in a war; neither the count of enemy dead nor of our own soldiers lost provides an adequate understanding of the stakes involved. But if we are to count the dead, let us not forget to count the 200,000. That is not a typo.

The “body count” is a very bad way to assess progress in a war; neither the count of enemy dead nor of our own soldiers lost provides an adequate understanding of the stakes involved. But if we are to count the dead, let us not forget to count the 200,000. That is not a typo.

Forensic experts have uncovered mass graves in Iraq with 200,000 bodies – so far – and believe as many as 200,000 more remain un-exhumed. There are men, women and a startling number of children. There are graves with five, fifteen and hundreds. Some were killed as long ago as the early 1990s, some as late as 2003. Their graves span the far southern reaches and the northern edges of Iraq. They were tortured or shot or buried alive. There are Shi’ites, Kurds and Sunnis, according to family members who line up to identify remains and give their loved ones a proper burial.

Little has been made of this in the American press. Journalists expected to find caches of WMD, not caches of human remains. But those remains lead us to the larger questions – to what end is the American sacrifice of 2,000 brave young men and women thus far?

JINSA is clear that Saddam’s depredations throughout the 1980s and 1990s made his removal necessary. In the post-9-11 environment, we agreed with the President and Congress that waiting longer for Iraq to comply with UN demands for accountability on WMD would be counterproductive. We also knew that UN sanctions were falling heavily on those Iraqis least able to tolerate them, while failing to curtail Saddam’s funding for weapons, palaces and suicide bombers. The UN reported that its own sanctions were causing 5,000 “excess deaths” of children each month in Iraq [the number over the average before the sanctions]. But even we are stunned by the number of people Saddam had killed in ones, twos and tens.

In the narrow sense, the U.S.-led coalition is fighting to provide political space for Iraqis to establish a government by the consent of the governed. If they are successful, mass murder by its own government will be Iraq’s past, not its future. This makes the decision of the Sunni militias to participate in the upcoming Parliamentary election a victory to be celebrated in its own right. In the broader sense, through Iraq and Afghanistan to Lebanon, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Libya, Egypt, Jordan, the PA, Pakistan, Syria and Iran, citizens are coming to believe that their future lies in political choice – and dictators are coming to fear the same thing.

If the experiment fails, the dictators will take heart and the citizens will be crushed. Those who fight to make it fail are a coalition of secular and religious totalitarians whose goals begin with civil war in Iraq and extend to building a base for the export of violent Islamic radicalism across the Middle East, into Europe and across the oceans.

We mourn the 2,000 and mourn the 200,000. But we believe American soldiers, as they were in World War II, are liberators while they fight totalitarian oppression that would surely come to our shores without their defense of our freedom and security.