Shadowland: War By The Numbers

It's fallen to the press and to human-rights activists to try to count the Iraqi dead, and to one woman, a 26-year-old Californian named Marla Ruzicka, to try to help the victims' families.

In June, the Associated Press surveyed Iraqi hospitals and counted 3,420 confirmed civilian deaths from March 20 to April 20, at the height of major combat operations. But that's a very, very conservative number. Because the AP did not want to risk counting any Iraqi soldier as civilian, and Basra hospitals did not make clear distinctions, it counted no civilian deaths at all in the nation's second-largest city, where there was a lot of bloody urban combat.

A volunteer organization in Britain, IraqBodyCount.net, compiles a number based entirely on press reports. The current figure is between 7,376 and 9,178, but because this is an openly left-wing antiwar group, many people find its reporting suspect. Cofounder Hamit Dardagan takes the position that even if the numbers aren't totally accurate, "if the war was avoidable, so was all the collateral damage."

To tell you the truth, I think this emphasis on numbers, as such, is deeply ambiguous. I felt that way during Kosovo, and I feel that way about Iraq. It is people who are mourned, not statistics. Beyond a certain point (perhaps a few hundred) the scale becomes impossible to comprehend, a matter of curiosity and sterile debate. Just ask yourself, was the experience of September 11 eased when we found "only" 3,000 people had died in the World Trade Center and not 20,000 as we thought at first? Did those accounting clarifications help the grieving families?

That's why other groups deserve more attention, I think, than the simple body-counters. Human Rights Watch, which came up with the best number for civilian dead in Kosovo, has also sent researchers to Iraq. But they now put less emphasis on numbers than trends and legal issues, looking at the way civilian casualties can be reduced in future conflicts.

Ruzicka, who did similar work with civilian casualties in Afghanistan, has organized a group called the Campaign for Innocent Victims in Conflict (CIVIC) which has sent survey teams all over Iraq "to find cases," as she puts it, not just numbers. The idea is to push the American government to help the survivors, which you'd think would be a smart move politically as well as morally. So far, Ruzicka's teams have identified the cases of 1,860 civilians killed and 3,560 injured. "Why does the [Bush] administration say they go to great lengths to prevent these deaths," asks Ruzicka, "but when they occur, I am the one to go to the families and say 'sorry'?"