Lies, Damn Lies, and Body Counts

The body count our government doesn’t want us to remember

I started to laugh today at David Brooks’s piece in the NY Times. But then the feeling turned more to nausea.

According to Brooks, we shouldn’t run our Iraq policy based on polls that say most Americans think we should pull out. I couldn’t agree more that government policy of any kind shouldn’t be run by what the people want, because let’s face it, the American people are, in general, ill-informed and easily manipulated. (Hell, supposedly a majority of Americans believe in the six-day creation story. And you want to trust something as complex as our Middle East policy to them? Sheesh.)

But what really got me, though, was the different set of numbers Brooks offered up as ones we should give credence to in deciding what we should do in Iraq.

Here they are: “U.S. forces have completed a series of successful operations, among them Operation Spear in western Iraq, where at least 60 insurgents were killed and 100 captured, and Operation Lightning in Baghdad, with over 500 arrests. American forces now hold at least 14,000 suspected insurgents, and have captured about two dozen lieutenants of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.”

For those of you too young to remember, we used to get this sort of “information”, i.e. body counts, in the last moronic war we let our lying government get us in to. In that war, we certainly killed over one million of our enemy, but they “only” got 55,000 or so of us. Strangely, even though we out-killed them over 20 to 1, we lost.

If you need a further hint as to what I’m talking about, the Prime Minister of that country was here this week to visit Bush and Rumsfeld. And oh yes, now we’re going to send him some military advisors.

Honesty, I’m not making this up.

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One more brief thing today: if you need more evidence that the wrong guy got to take over the White House 5 years ago, read this.