January 9, 2006

Good news? Actually no, bad news. It's a trick answer. Because you see it turns out that four of the 12 people who died in that Black Hawk "crash" (in quotes because the U.S. military still claims it doesn't know whether it was shot down or not) were American civilians, not members of the military, and hence won't be included in those tallies of "American" dead, won't be called "heroes," and won't be remembered by anyone except their families and friends.

The real number of Americans killed in Iraq? Closing in on, if not already past, 2500 rather than 2200. The number of Iraqis killed? Unknown, but well over 100,000, no matter how you count (but definitely depending, as with the Americans, on who you count).

British, Italians, Poles, Ukranians, and miscellaneous "others"? Nobody remembers them except Iraq Coalition Casualty Count. Even the website of the Multi-National Force-Iraq only provides links to the webpages of the US DoD and the British Ministry of Defence. The others are quite literally not even worth mentioning. I hope the governments of those countries got a nice payoff for providing cannon fodder to the "coalition." The people of those countries, who I believe without exception opposed the invasion, didn't even get the "benefit" of having their dead honored by being remembered.