Dickey: War by the Numbers

I REMEMBER, just a few years back, Wes Clark was feeling pretty good about his war. This was in July 1999, just after he’d commanded the victorious NATO fight for Kosovo, just before he was fired by the Pentagon, and way before anyone thought about him as a presidential candidate. I had been in Belgrade when the allied air forces were attacking, and General Clark wanted to hear, firsthand, what it was like.

If Clark was feeling cocky, it was because thanks to the Air Force (and despite his own frustrated desire to send in ground troops), he’d just fought the cleanest, most efficient war in history, without a single allied casualty. The bombing campaign went on for 78 days, 38,000 sorties, yet by the end, people in Belgrade’s sidewalk cafes barely looked up from their espressos when the air-raid sirens wailed. One of the city’s main streets was known as the Boulevard of Ashes, because the government buildings on it had been destroyed systematically and repeatedly. But the buildings right next to them were mostly unscathed.

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When the United States and Britain invaded Iraq last March, some of the lessons learned in Kosovo were applied, and some weren’t. The bombing was amazingly meticulous. Even Human Rights Watch investigator Marc Garlasco gives the Air Force credit for “an outstanding job.” But this time the U.S. Army and Marines did go into action, using weaponry that included multiple-launch rockets that rain cluster bombs on the enemy—and it appears that most of the civilians who died were killed by infantry.
How many civilians would that be? The Pentagon piled up statistics on just about everything, except for the number of innocents killed in Operation Iraqi Freedom and its aftermath. When asked why, the answer is always that the job is too difficult, that this was the Iraqis’ business, that families buried their dead without ever reporting them. “We don’t do body counts,” Gen. Tommy Franks declared last year after the big offensives in Afghanistan.
What that means in Iraq is that while the Bush administration may spend $1 billion to find those elusive weapons of mass destruction, it just doesn’t want to know about the people whose lives the war destroyed, much less pay them compensation

http://www.msnbc.com/news/975627.asp?0cl=c1