The Cost of War

My friend David sent me the link to this website that tracks the fatalaties suffered by the "Coalition" forces in Iraq since the start of the war in March, 2003 (updated through August 4 of this year). It's an interesting graphic interpretation created by Tim Klimowicz that also includes sound, and it tracks the timing and location of deaths suffered by the US led forces. It's rather eye-opening in that it represents the breadth, in terms of both time and location, of the devastation suffered by our military forces. Log on also to the Iraq Coalition Casualty Count web site to keep track of the numbers (2,047 total deaths, 1,853 of them US soldiers as of this writing).

Where this falls short (acknowledged by Mr. Klimowicz himself) is that it doesn't detail the loss of life suffered by the Iraqi "enemies". The President's ever-evolving goal in Iraq has been to eliminate Saddam Hussein (check), get rid of Iraq's Weapons of Mass Destruction (well, that one certainly backfired!), and eliminate the terrorist threat (not sure we ever had the right idea on this one, though). The numbers are difficult to come by, at least via US search engines, but the Iraq Body Count web site estimates roughly 23,000 - 27,000 Iraqi citizens have been killed in the war. This does not include military deaths, mind you. It's impossible to quantify how many of the dead were actual terrorists, but I suspect the number is somewhere south (far south) of 23,000.

Now, we know that anybody can put anything up on the Internet - I'm living proof of that. But the creators of this web site make the database readily available and cite two sources for each report. I think that it's a reasonable representation of the losses. And while the media in this country are centered on the loss of US lives, the real cost of war is measured in all human lives lost. Not all Iraqi citizens hate the United States. (Well, not before the war anyway.) The loss of these lives, especially the innocent lives, should be mourned by every US citizen as we ask if it's worth it, and why are we really there?