[Absent, of course, Brad m'lad, were the party-pooping Iraqi civilians who didn't survive their liberation. Through the magic of data massage, though, I'm confident that we can expect the total number those unfortunates to dwindle -- e.g., from the NY Times:]
April 9, 2003
No Neat Categories for the Casualties of War
By JOHN M. BRODER
DOHA, Qatar, April 9 — The effort to number the dead on the Iraqi side in the war begins with a conundrum: who is a civilian and who is a combatant?
In Basra, for example, ambulance drivers and hospital workers estimate that they have handled 1,000 to 2,000 corpses during the three-week war.
Some were clearly military — they wore uniforms and army-issued boots. Others were clearly civilians — women and children and the elderly. Some were burned or blasted beyond recognition by bombs, artillery or grenades.
But perhaps hundreds more were men and boys of potential fighting age who arrived at hospitals and morgues in civilian clothes. Were they members of the Republican Guard who had thrown off their uniforms? Were they armed Baath Party loyalists fighting on behalf of Saddam Hussein's government? Were they members of the fedayeen or other irregulars? And even if they were, could they have been trying to surrender and been killed by their own side?
The same puzzle exists across the country, even more acutely and on a much larger scale in and around Baghdad. For example, relentless bombing and a week of ground combat left the Iraqi Army's Baghdad Division reduced to "zero percent strength," according to Marine officers who engaged the division. The Iraqi division was once thought to number about 10,000 soldiers. Where are they?
The problem of first sorting out and then trying to quantify the dead in this war is one that will plague journalists, human rights groups and military historians for years. ...
<http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/09/international/worldspecial/09CND-CASUAL.html>
Carl
_________________________________________________________________ Add photos to your messages with MSN 8. Get 2 months FREE*. http://join.msn.com/?page=features/featuredemail