The Associated Press announced this evening that the death toll for the Iraq War reached 4,000 today. That number is incorrect. It is correct to say that 4,000 US soldiers have been killed in Iraq, but it is incorrect to say that the death toll--even with the descriptive "American" added--for the war reached 4,000.
The problem is that that number doesn't count civilians, and it doesn't count Iraqis, and as a result, the American public doesn't have a real sense of just how devastating this war has been.
Nothing I am saying here is new. People have been making this same statement almost since the beginning of the war, and at one point, there was even some public outrage over the fact that the US wasn't doing civilian body counts. But that faded, just like coverage of the war has faded in recent months, thus enabling the farcical notion that the surge is working.
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