Numbers Game

Dr. Ivan Eland, Senior Fellow and Director of the Center on Peace & Liberty at the Independent Institute, on Body Count Redux:

During the Vietnam War, the U.S. military released body counts of enemy and friendly dead to the media, which reported them voraciously. Invariably, the military’s data—showing more enemy than friendly dead—was designed to give the illusion that the United States was winning the war. What the data didn’t show was more important: that a tenacious enemy fighting for its homeland would be willing to incur high casualties and outwait an opponent with a short attention span. Similarly, in Iraq, the U.S. military gleefully reports that attacks against U.S. soldiers have dropped by more than half since their peak in November of last year and that firefights between U.S. soldiers and Iraqi guerrillas in Iraqi towns have also diminished. But like the body counts in Vietnam, the American public should be wary of such rosy assessments.

The major reason that fighting between the U.S. military and the insurgents has declined is that the American forces have vacated the field of battle. However unfortunate, with a competitive election coming up this year, the White House knows that the only thing in Iraq that matters to the American public is how many U.S. soldiers are killed and wounded there. Thus, “force protection” has become the number one unstated goal in Iraq. American forces have been pulled out of Iraqi cities and towns and most security functions have been turned over to the amateurish, ill-trained and poorly equipped Iraqi security forces. This same phenomenon occurred in Bosnia in the mid-to late-nineties, when American public support for U.S. involvement in peacekeeping there was lukewarm. American soldiers were ridiculed by the peacekeeping forces of other nations for rarely coming out of their fortified bastions.

You can read the rest of Dr. Eland's commentary here. This entry also posted at Stand Down.