Statistics are a bloodless way to tell the story of a war but in the absence of territory to claim (or claim/reclaim as was the case in Vietnam) and lacking an independent press to document the war, there isn’t much else to report. But even the simple statistics are twisted.
In the “war” against ISIS (unauthorized, Obama soon to ask Congress for ISIS war authority), Nancy A. Youssef reports in U.S. Won’t Admit to Killing a Single Civilian in the ISIS War:
Five months and 1,800-plus strikes into the U.S. air campaign against ISIS, and not a single civilian has been killed, officially. But Pentagon officials concede that they really have no way of telling for sure who has died in their attacks‚—and admit that no one will ever know how many have been slain.
A free and independent press reported the My Lai Massacre, which was only one of the untold number of atrocities against civilians in Vietname. The current generation of “journalists” drink the military’s Kool-Aid with no effort to document the impact of its airstrikes. Instead of bemoaning the lack of independent reports, the media should be the origin of independent reports.
How do you square the sheepish admission from the Pentagon that they don’t know who had dies in their attacks with statements by the U.S. Ambassador to Iraq, Stuart Jones, claiming that 6,000 ISIS fighters and half their leadership has been killed?
That sounds administration top-heavy if one out of every two fighters is a leader. Inside the beltway in D.C. is the only known location with that ratio of “leaders” to “followers.” But realistically, if the Pentagon had those sort of numbers, they would be repeating them in every daily briefing. Yes? Unless you think Ambassador Jones has a crystal ball, the most likely case is those numbers are fictional.
I don’t doubt there have been civilian casualties. In war there are always civilian casualties. What troubles me is the don’t look, don’t tell position of the U.S. military command in order to make war palatable to a media savvy public.
War should be unpalatable. It should be presented in its full gory details, videos of troops bleeding out on the battlefield, burials, families torn apart, women, children and men killed in ways we don’t want to imagine, all of the aspects that make it unpalatable.
If nothing else, it will sharpen the debate on war powers in Congress because then the issue won’t be model towns and cars but people who are dying before our very eyes on social media. How many more lives will we take to save the Arab world from Arabs?