America reached another milestone in Iraq this week. The number of US servicemen and women killed in the war/occupation hit, then quickly passed 1,900.
Officially, nearly 15,000 US troops have been wounded. Antiwar critics say the total far exceeds 20,000 and the Pentagon has fudged the numbers.
And wounds suffered in this conflict from RPGs and IEDs - the favored weapons of the Iraq insurgency - are frequently more horrific and life-altering than wounds suffered in previous conflicts ...
This means arms blown off, legs blown away, skulls torn open, as well as brain damage, nerve damage, blindness, deafness, paralysis, etc.
On the Iraqi side, the death toll according to some accounts - here I'm thinking of the study conducted by Johns Hopkins University - exceeds 100,000.
Of course, the Pentagon claims the number of insurgents to be no higher than 20,000. So does that mean we've killed off the insurgency five times over?
Or, is it more likely that antiwar critics are right: that most of the 100,000-plus Iraqi deaths are civilians - the euphemistic "collateral damage" our government uses to describe slaughter of the innocent?
All that is open to debate of course. But what I'm reasonably certain of is this.
Had the US media reported on the Iraq conflict with the same raw, candid, graphic honesty as they did the Katrina disaster, it wouldn't be 62% of Americans saying we should get out of Iraq. It would be closer to 80%.
And we might not be on our way to the next Iraq milestone: 2,000 dead GIs.
NationalDebunker