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Body Counts
 In
order to show that “we” are winning in Iraq, the U.S.
military has decided to resume the abandoned practice of releasing enemy
body counts. It’s a bit confusing. The idea, as I understand it, is that
the more insurgents are killed by U.S. forces, the sooner Iraq will be free.
In other words, some Iraqis are
fighting those who invaded Iraq,  but the invaders are trying to defeat them so that Iraq will have
freedom.
I’d also like to see body
counts of noncombatants, especially women and children. Just curious, you
understand. I’m not accusing anyone of anything. Maybe it’s all
worth it. But how can the American taxpayer begin to assess the full price of
the war without knowing how many people, American and Iraqi, are dying in it?
That’s just basic
information. Why is that sort of thing kept secret from us, when
we’re told the war is being fought for our benefit? Aren’t we
ourselves supposed to decide that? What kind of self-government is it that
withholds facts from its own citizens?
Supporters of the war tend to be
suspicious of people who ask such questions. We’re supposed to trust
our government. If we don’t trust it completely and support the war,
says a columnist in the New York Post, we’re in effect
helping the enemy, and we may cause the war to be lost at home.
After all, our leaders know more
than we do about the foreign danger, just as President Bush knows more
than we do about Harriet Miers’s qualifications for the U.S. Supreme
Court. Who are we to second-guess them? So goes the argument, anyway.
Asking too many questions is unpatriotic.
![[Breaker quote for Body Counts: Are "we" winning the Iraq war?]](2005breakers/051025.gif) Sometimes
our leaders have to deceive
us for our own good. The classic case is Franklin Roosevelt, who had to lie to
the American people in order to get them into World War II, for their own
good, when more than 80 per cent of them thought they were better off
staying out of it. Roosevelt was proved right when the United States won the
war. After the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, Americans stopped asking
unpatriotic questions about him, millions died, and today he is remembered as
one of our greatest presidents.
Wise leaders often have to save
democracies from the people, just as the police may sometimes have to
plant incriminating evidence on suspects who they are pretty sure are guilty
but who might be acquitted by a jury. That’s one way to look at it.
After all, Henry V is remembered as one of England’s greatest kings
for invading and conquering France. Today France is free. You can’t
argue with success.
Lincoln saw that the country
couldn’t remain free if Southern states seceded from the Union, so he
invaded them. He also saw that freedom was threatened by Northerners who
opposed the invasion, so he had them thrown in jail and shut down their
newspapers. Freedom was saved, 600,000 young men died, and today he too
is remembered as one of our greatest presidents.
Drastic measures aren’t
always necessary. People are a strange mix of courage and timidity, and
often they are more effectively controlled by subtle social pressures than by
crude threats. The man who might be roused to fight by the challenge of
torture and death may cower at being sneered at in the faculty lounge. In the
one case, he knows his manhood is being tested; in the other, he may not
realize he’s being tested at all. This sort of social conformity is so
powerful because it’s hardly conscious.
For some time, most Americans
supported the Iraq war not because Bush used any real threats of
repression, but because of what we now call peer pressure; as I like to put it,
public opinion is what everyone thinks everyone else is thinking. But that only
works until people start admitting their doubts to each other.
It has now sunk in that Iraq was
never a threat to us. It was all a fiction that has gradually expired, and now
the only “justification” for the war is that it is being won. But
few Americans are likely to believe that either, at this point, no matter what
the body counts may say. The only question that matters now is what the
U.S. Government has done to the people of Iraq. Don’t hold your
breath waiting for a straight answer to that one.
Joseph Sobran |
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| Copyright © 2005 by the
Griffin Internet Syndicate, a division of Griffin Communications This column may not be reprinted in print or Internet publications without express permission of Griffin Internet Syndicate 
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