Unnamed Dead of Iraq

Tomgram: Judith Coburn

On July 23, 2003, not quite four months after Baghdad had been occupied by American troops, Tomdispatch published a piece by Jack Miles, author of the Pulitzer Prize winning book God: A Biography, entitled How Many Iraqis Have We Killed?

At that time, less than 100 Americans had died in the "post-war" era in Iraq, while untold numbers of Iraqis were dying in those same months. The Bush administration and the Pentagon were already invested in not counting, or even acknowledging, Iraqi deaths, and the media had already established a habit of leaving those deaths largely unconsidered and unnamed. Miles suggested that "at stake was American honor." He asked: "Will it be said -- years from now, perhaps even months from now -- that in the first preemptive war in American history, Americans did not ask and did not want to know how many Iraqis they had killed and did not consider it their responsibility to so much as notify the orphans, the widows, and the bereaved parents?"

The answer to that question has long been in and, as Judith Coburn, a journalist who once covered the carnage of the Vietnam War, indicates below, it's a sorry answer indeed. Back in that now-distant time, to introduce Miles' piece, I wrote:

"Each day, for instance, a modest box labeled ‘Names of the Dead' -- yesterday with five names: Bertoldie, Joel L, Garvey, Justin W, Jordan, Jason D., Rozier, Jonathan D, and Whetstone, Mason Douglas -- is nestled on the inside page devoted to Iraq stories in my hometown paper the New York Times. Our casualties have, in fact, turned into a kind of countdown -- or count up -- though to what still remains in question."

What our casualties were already a countdown to seems horrifically clearer today, while the casualties of the people we claimed to be liberating still remain largely missing in action.

Two years later, the latest "Names of the Dead" box at the bottom corner of page 9 of Friday's Times notes: "The Department of Defense has identified 1,752 American service members who have died since the start of the Iraq war. It confirmed the death of the following American yesterday. YAHUDAH, Benyahmin B. 24, Specialist, Army; Bogart, Ga.; Third Infantry Division."

Benyahmin B. Yahudah was killed when a suicide bomber detonated his SUV near a U.S. military vehicle surrounded by Iraqi children, many of whom died in the blast. We are told in reports from Iraq that, in the last few days, two Marines, whose names will in due course be included in one of those boxed announcements, were killed when their vehicle struck an IED near the Jordanian border, and seven Americans were wounded in a string of suicide bomb blasts and explosions across the Baghdad area which killed at least 29 Iraqis, many (but hardly all of them) policemen and soldiers, and wounded perhaps another 104.

Of those Iraqis -- as opposed to the Londoners who died (or survived) the recent subway and bus bombings -- there will be no stirring portraits of stiff-upper-lip courage or of horror. Hardly even the odd name. Not here anyway. In this country, there is something impersonal, numbingly distant, and unreal about Iraqi deaths, even though the dead Iraqis too had parents and relatives, friends and neighbors, husbands, wives, or lovers, possibly children of their own.

When it comes to Iraqis, in fact, even the simplest official figures have been hard to come by. As a result, the carnage we unleashed in the now failed-state of Iraq in the wake of our invasion is hard even to grasp. Based on rare figures for Iraqi deaths that Sabrina Tavernise of the New York Times succeeded in getting the Iraqi Health Ministry to release, Juan Cole recently concluded the following at his Informed Comment blog: >>>continued

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