>
> [4,000 Iraqis dead in one month is a whole hell of a
> lot of deaths.] ... the insurgency's continued strength
> after U.S. forces killed as many as 4,000 in April alone.
Four thousand my ass. Bad obviously lying numbers, stink on ice. (So how bad they must stink over there, where it's 115 F in the sun all day long!) Four thousand "enemy" dead in one month, you'd have to be talking about a kill-ratio of 40-1 or better.
("kill-ratio," ecch what a phrase, Michael Herr's "Dispatches": "It was a characteristic of a lot of Americans in Vietnam to have no idea of when they were being obscene, and some correspondents fell into that, writing their stories from the daily releases and battlegrams, tracking them through with the cheer-crazed language of the MACV Information Office, things like "discreet burst" (one of those tore an old grandfather and two children to bits as they ran along a paddy wall one day, at least according to the report made later by the gunship pilot), "friendly casualties" (not warm, not fun), "meeting engagement" (ambush), concluding usually with 17 or 117 or 317 enemy dead and American losses "described as light." There were correspondents who had the same sensibility concerning the dead as the Command had: Well, in a war you've got to expect a little mud to get tracked over the carpet, we took a real black eye but we sure gave Charlie a shitstorm, we consider this a real fine kill ratio, real fine...")
Anyway, the U.S. military's well armed, but forty to one against heavily armed Arab hotheads on their own home turf? You know where these unbelievable numbers are coming from. Me for example, I'm no soldier, I don't even own a gun, but suppose I were an average Joe in Fallujah instead of Tampa - sure there are plenty of average Joes there, like everywhere - and one sunny day the U.S. Marines rolled up and blew my head off, betcha anything I'd have been counted as one of the four thousand. I'm an adult male, but it's even money, even if it were a nine-year-old or an infirm old unarmed grandma the boys had "lit up," their commander would still have added another "insurgent's" corpse to the score.
Yours WDK - WKiernan at ij.net