Pop Quiz Hotshot: How many civilians have been killed in Iraq sin e the start of this most recent war?
I failed this one. If you had asked me two days ago, I would have said, "I dunno," and shamefully looked at my feet.
Part of the reason I would have failed can be chalked up to my own sloth, callousness, and ignorance. Hey I had important things to do like....watch the Yankee game? Sorry doesn't cut it. But, (he wrote, offering up his weak excuses) part of my ignorance can be attributed to the shameful dearth of reporting on civilian deaths. I'd be willing to bet that more than 95% or Americans couldn't give a rough estimate in answere to the question, for the same reasons that I couldn't. This Saturday, however, The Times had a number for me, conveniently placed in the easy to spot location of paragraph 21 on page 7. (good god....)
In London today, a British-American research group said that estimates of civilian deaths in Iraq since the war began were from 5,534 to 7,207.
That's civilian deaths only. That figure doesn't include the deaths of young Iraqis who were conscripted into the army, given a rifle left over from the second world war, and told "Here, now go fight some U.S. armored divisions and aerial fighters." No, those Iraqis deserved it right? So their deaths don't count. (Please please don't think I'm being serious here). Oh, and then there's all those U.S. casualties.
Let's try to assign some value to this catastophe. We'll call it the Tragedy Index, and it will include lost lives, the damage done to people who were maimed or otherwise seriously injured, lost homes, lost farms, etc. Say one death registers 1 point on the tragedy index and a serious injury is, what, close to 1 point? A farm wiped out...a little bit less than what a serious injury is worth? Now assign a value to the damage done when the Iraqi national archive was incinerated, the museum looted, the remnants of a 6,000 year old civilization destroyed, etc. Now maybe some points for the anguish U.S. soldiers have gone through seeing comrades killed, anguish U.S. soldiers have gone through because they've had to kill other people, anguish from being seperated from their families....it all deserves some value. Oh, and make sure to assign a number to the damge done to Iraqis' collective pysche. If you're still around but your sister was killed during an air raid and you're little brother's now got one arm, you sure as hell get assigned some points.
So add that all up. Now tell me if youre number on the TI is small enough to justify everythings that has happened in the past three months. The number I get is way too fucking big. Actually, it's incomprehensibly big, quite literally. How do we measure these things and how do we determine the difference between 100 deaths, 1000, deaths, 5000 deaths...etc? To us, it's all just "one big number," not because we're indifferent (though I might use that word to describe some people) but because the human mind is only capable of processing a certain amount of information. I know what 5 deaths looks like, or 10, or maybe 100, but a little beyond that and it's all simply "a lot."
I might suggest that Bush calculate his own index, but then again math was never the strong suit of this administration.
Posted by mike at June 16, 2003 12:28 PM