The Defense Department’s lastest tally shows: 273 U.S. soldiers have been killed in Iraq (135 of them since May 1, the day President Bush declared the end of major combat); 1,069 have been wounded in action; 299 have been injured in non-hostile situations.
Robert Garbe and a few veterans of previous wars wanted to know why The Courant doesn’t routinely report the total number of wounded. Garbe’s reason was more than a criticism of the newspaper.
“My grandson is on his way over to Iraq, to a city west of Baghdad,” the Old Saybrook resident said last week. “I have a personal interest in being aware of the potential dangerous situations my grandson will be subjected to.”
With the number of casualties growing daily in Iraq, Garbe is more than justified in questioning The Courant. In addition to checking off the captured members of Saddam Hussein’s crew, tracking U.S. casualties is clearly an important measure of the success of the military operation.
As Garbe said, “I would much prefer that the need for this type of information did not exist. However, reporting the actual numbers on a continuing basis will indicate how effective our occupation is in securing the safety of our military personnel and, if not sufficiently effective, what measures are required to reduce or eliminate the rate increase.”
The bombing of the U.N. compound in Baghdad on Tuesday made Garbe’s point even clearer. Almost immediately there were questions about the ability of the U.S.-led forces to secure Iraq. By Thursday, Gen. John Abizaid, commander of U.S. Central Command, was assuring the news media that the 139,000 U.S. troops in Iraq were adequate. “The number of troops, boots per square foot, is not the issue,” he said.
Garbe and Courant Assistant Managing Editor/News Bernie Davidow agree on the fundamental issue of reporting casualty numbers.
Davidow said: “Our job is to supply as much relevant information about new developments as we possibly can and to give that new information as much context as possible. When we run stories saying more U.S. GIs have been killed, it would be appropriate to remind readers how many have been killed overall.”
But, as Davidow pointed out, the news services do not routinely provide information about the wounded.
It’s not that that information isn’t available. But it does take a little extra effort to find it. A major source of the newspaper’s war coverage, The Associated Press, maintains a database that contains casualty information on all coalition forces. But the news service says on its subscriber-only website that its tally “does not include injured service members because comprehensive information on them is not available.”
Paula Froke, projects editor in AP’s New York office, said last week, however, that AP will try to work with Centcom to provide on the wires daily counts of the wounded.
Centcom didn’t hesitate to provide the number of wounded when I asked for it. But the information is not posted on its website or the Defense Department’s site, www.defenselink.com, where information about the dead is routinely updated.
Still, Garbe wanted The Courant to go even further by providing a daily log of casualties and a running total of the cost of the war.
Davidow wondered what the point would be.
“On days when no GIs die, and nothing has changed, what is to be served by running those numbers again?” Davidow asked. “We wouldn’t run a story saying no GIs were killed in Iraq today. If none was killed for a significant period of time, that could be news in itself, and it might be appropriate to remind readers of the total toll at that time. On cost estimates, we should print new information that significantly alters cost estimates for the war.”
The problem is the number of dead and wounded grows practically every day. That seems like news to me.
