Return of the Body Count?

A REVEALING PIECE
by Tom Engelhardt

"It's been clear since the Afghan War began in 2001 that no one had the Vietnam analogy more programmatically on their brains than the Bush team in the White House and the Pentagon. It was visibly clear that they went into Iraq in 2003 playing an opposites game with the "mistakes" of Vietnam (as they saw them) -- while excoriating any critics who cared to make comparisons to the Vietnam experience. Part of administration planning was clearly aimed at avoiding all enemy "body counts," since (as the Vietnam War dragged on) the body count of kills, announced in Saigon each day, came to discredit the whole effort. All blood, no results. So, starting in Afghanistan, this administration was clearly going to produce only results and no enemy body counts.

Tommy Franks, the US commander of that operation, famously said so. "We don't do body counts" was his statement. But -- until this week -- we had no other insider confirmation that, right down to the body count, Vietnam remained the anti-template for the war in Iraq.

It seems that the man who, in December 2005, finally offered a cumulative (unbelievably low-ball) body count of 30,000 for all Iraqi deaths by violence since 2003 and then "stood by" that same number almost 11 bloody months later, was most frustrated that he couldn't offer the American people a real, notch-on-the-gun, continuous measure of "progress" in Iraq -- just how many enemies we were knocking off there regularly. "We don't get to say," said Bush, in what was evidently an outburst of irritation, "that -- a thousand of the enemy killed, or whatever the number was. It's happening. You just don't know it."

"'We have made a conscious effort not to be a body-count team,' Bush said, in a clear reference to the tabulations of enemy killed that became a hallmark of the Vietnam War. And that, in turn, "gives you the impression that [U.S. troops] are just there -- kind of moving around, directing traffic, and somebody takes a shot at them and they're down."


So now we know. This can officially be declared the anti-Vietnam, anti-body count war. The President has told us so."