Shadowland: War By The Numbers

When the United States and Britain invaded Iraq last March, some of the lessons learned in Kosovo were applied, and some weren't. The bombing was amazingly meticulous. Even Human Rights Watch investigator Marc Garlasco gives the Air Force credit for "an outstanding job." But this time the U.S. Army and Marines did go into action, using weaponry that included multiple-launch rockets that rain cluster bombs on the enemy--and it appears that most of the civilians who died were killed by infantry.

How many civilians would that be? The Pentagon piled up statistics on just about everything, except for the number of innocents killed in Operation Iraqi Freedom and its aftermath. When asked why, the answer is always that the job is too difficult, that this was the Iraqis' business, that families buried their dead without ever reporting them. "We don't do body counts," Gen. Tommy Franks declared last year after the big offensives in Afghanistan.

What that means in Iraq is that while the Bush administration may spend $1 billion to find those elusive weapons of mass destruction, it just doesn't want to know about the people whose lives the war destroyed, much less pay them compensation.

Even as the administration talks about building democracy and preaches the rule of law, the U.S. government turns its back on the claims of civilians who lost fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters, sons and daughters in this war. Under American law, which is the only one that counts in this case, civilians have no redress if they are killed in combat--and in practice, any time an American soldier fires his weapons and an Iraqi, any Iraqi, gets killed, that's combat.

In August, when American military officials adjudicating Iraqi claims for financial compensation were asked about civilian casualties, they couldn't cite a single instance of wrongful death. They'd paid out a lot of money for accidental property damage caused by the occupation, but if money was paid for someone who'd been killed, which they doubted, it wasn't enough to make a blip on their screen. "The value of a life in Iraq--and I hate to say it--is probably a lot less in the United States, or Britain, for that matter," one officer explained.

Since then, the United States did give $11,000 to a woman who was eight months pregnant when American soldiers gunned down her husband and three of her children in Baghdad, but that was "for sympathy," she was told, and not an admission of error. The Reuters cameraman who was shot, the Iraqi police in Baghdad who were killed--they died under "the rules of engagement" and have no redress. The only case still under investigation is of the eight U.S.-trained Iraqi policemen blown away by U.S. troops in the rebellious city of Fallujah.