The War On Terror by Numbers

I suppose body counts aren’t the best way to measure who is winning in a conflict. In the first “Warworld” novel by Jerry Pournelle, wars of attrition were described as being the least elegant way to win, like using a paint-by-numbers kit to make a copy of the Mona Lisa. And when we concentrate on the numbers of killed, wounded, missing and captured, warfare becomes a modern-day form of potlatching, that custom among Pacific coast Indians where they flaunted their wealth by showing how much they could destroy or waste. Still, until we can agree on a point system for clever strategies, the element of surprise, and just plain courage, it will have to remain the best way to keep score. Anybody want to guess on how many points General MacArthur earned for his daring landing at Inchon? Or what score did Washington get for sneaking across the half-frozen Delaware River at night, to ambush the Hessians on Christmas?

That is one reason why I’ve been mad at the mainstream media’s coverage of the current war. In my essay “Couch Potato Warriors“, I pointed out that they routinely let us know how many of our boys were lost in war zones like Iraq, but won’t tell us how many enemies were killed. Nor do they keep the losses in perspective, as tragic as they are. I’ve also been mad with how the White House doesn’t want to respond to the absurd charges being hurled against the president and his staff, like the big fuss over President Bush’s statement that Saddam Hussein had sent agents to Africa to buy uranium. So far no evidence of those agents has turned up in Niger, the country where they were most likely to go. At the time I wondered out loud how much of a public relations/foreign policy disaster it would have been, if we learned that Saddam’s agents had gone to Chad instead? And if the war had really been over oil, wouldn’t we have just taken it by now? Never mind the WMDs, judging from gas prices at the pump, it doesn’t look like we found much oil in Iraq either!

Well, just as it took a few years to come up with a successful pacification strategy for Iraq (the current “surge”), now the current administration is finally fighting back with the facts. In a speech to the Veterans of Foreign Wars on August 22th, President Bush said that an average of 1,500 terrorists are killed or captured in Iraq, for each month of 2007. Because the surge was announced in January, I assume we weren’t bagging as many before then. Here’s a YouTube video of the excerpt:

Of course, part of the problem is that as with the war in Vietnam, we’re dealing with an enemy that doesn’t wear uniforms, nor does it march under a flag very often (When they do show a flag, it’s a poor excuse for a banner. Ever see the one Hezbollah uses, which features an AK-47 rifle on a yellow field? Yuck.). Therefore it’s hard to tell the terrorists from the civilians, especially when they’re dead; this is why the number of civilian casualties always appears to be inflated. According to Wikipedia, our best guess at the enemy dead in Iraq ranges from 12,077 to 13,292. Figures for Afghanistan are even harder to come by, since that country, like all of Central Asia, is still a frontier zone (I once heard Central Asia called “the Wild East”). It looks like between 10,000 and 20,000 members of the Taliban and Al Qaeda have been killed there.

For casualties on our side, the latest Defense Department estimate is 3,722 for Iraq, 424 for Afghanistan. Total = 4,146. While every death or maiming is a tragedy for us, keep in mind that we suffered about the same number of deaths in the American Revolution, when US population was 1 percent of what it is now, so if Al Qaeda is going to hit us as hard as King George III did, it will have to cause more than 400,000 American casualties. No wonder they want nukes!

Okay, so over the past six years we have lost 4,146, while they have lost anywhere from 22,077 to 33,292. And this is only for Afghanistan and Iraq; I’m not including other war zones like Israel, Chechnya, the southern Philippines, Thailand, or Somalia. All things considered, it looks like for every American they kill, we are killing 5 to 8 “insurgents.” Not a bad ratio, if we can keep it up.

The Islamist leaders promise 72 houris (virgins) in Paradise for every martyr who dies for Allah, so by hitting the calculator again, I find that Allah has had to give away between 1,589,544 and 2,397,024 virgins so far, in order to keep that promise. Any idea when he’ll run out? This 2005 article from The Knish, a Jewish version of The Onion, shows a headline we’re likely to see when that happens (LOL).

Finally, to our brave men and women in uniform, pay no heed to our media, and don’t forget to take this!