Iraqi Body Counting Debates

I don’t claim to be able to see into the future but the self-protective part of my psyche had to have been working overtime on the morning of 9/11.

My alarm had gone off at 5:45AM or so. I laid in the bed wondering how I, as confirmed night owl, had wound up with a job that requires I get up less than 5 hours after I would have gone to bed if given my druthers. After weeks of internal debate, a.k.a. procrastination, I decided that it was an exceptionally bad idea to wake up to the sound of news anchors babbling about what horrible thing had happened the day before. I decided I would change my television alarm clock to PBS and listen to Sesame Street while getting dressed for work from now on.

I had barely completed the thought before I found myself running to the television set because I’d just heard that one of the twin towers of the World Towers had “exploded” or something.

Looking at the image before me, I wondered what the reporter had been smoking before the broadcast. He’d said that “maybe a Cessna” had hit the towers as some people had reported seeing a plane hit the tower when ten Cessna-s flying single file couldn’t have left a hole that big.

When I came back to the television set five minutes later, after having taken my shower, I watched a jetliner slam into the second tower. The reporter on television said something like, “There’s no doubt about it now...This was deliberate.”

That statement was probably more shocking to me than seeing that plane disappear into a building, disappear into a ball of flame, merge with that tower of steel and glass, and simply disintegrate, cease to exist as an airplane. “This was deliberate.” Those words made me feel almost dizzy, getting me as close to fainting as I hope to ever get in this life time.

I wasn’t sure how this incident would affect the small air traffic control tower where I was worked. I was only sure that it would. I was sure that I would wind up sitting around all day, and I did, but I was equally sure that my manager and the powers that be above him would panic if I didn’t show up in favor of calling friends and loved ones back home in New York. I desperately wanted to make sure the one person I know works across the street from the World Trade Center had gotten out, but I didn’t want to panic his wife either—in case she hadn’t heard yet.

So, I went to work. On the way, numbers were coming at me fast and furious-- the number of people that work in the twin towers daily, the number of people who should be at work at 8:30 in the morning within the towers, the number of people in the subways below them.

We worked the tower in shifts, making sure no planes took off in the tower and going downstairs to watch the news. Having seen the second plane hit the second tower three or four times before I left home, I thought I’d seen it all, so I opted to stay in the tower...until I heard that one of the towers fell, and that another plane had crashed in Pennsylvania, and that yet another plane had hit the pentagon. My mind seemed like it could barely contain the news of each new disaster.

Between phone calls to the friend, finding out how far her husband was from what would later be called ground zero, I heard numbers of the possibly dead. Eventually I would hear numbers as high as 10,000.

After the buildings collapsed and the hours passed, the numbers of the possible-dead moved down to 6000 then stayed at 5000 for a few days or was it a few hours? After watching that plane slam into the second tower no less than a dozen or so times, my mind was numb and time passage didn’t seem real or even relevant.

I don’t remember how long the body count, the potential body count, was nearly twice the real and final number of dead, but I do remember how important those numbers were to us—no matter how inaccurate they were.

Why? Because once a large percentage of our fear had been replaced by normal desires for both justice and vengeance, we wanted to know how many of us had been killed. We wanted to know how many of our countryman had been victims. We wanted to know how many of us had been fatally injured. We wanted to know how many of our fellow citizens were here among us at sunrise and gone a few hours later. We would wait to know the what, where, when and how of the terrorists but we wanted to know exact quantity of what we’d lost right now.

Seconds after I understood what had happened, that we’d been attacked by terrorists, I wanted to want to know how many of me and mine had been killed. And the press reported the inaccurate numbers because they knew most people felt this way. So, while I cut myself some slack for not having the same immediate desire to know the number of dead amongst them and theirs in a different war—the number of Iraqi dead as a result of The War in Iraq—I can’t say I don’t want to hear inaccurate numbers simply because they are inaccurate unless I also say I simply don’t care at all—and I don’t know how anybody who calls themselves a true American can either.

Whether or not the Iraq war was declared on the basis of “mistakes” that truly were accidental mistakes or an arrogance so thorough as to make those “mistakes” more accurately called “negligence,” all you can say for sure about this war is that it has achieved none of its goals while killing thousands upon thousands.

As citizens of the country who declared this war, we don’t have the right not to care. I don’t think we have the right to care less about them than we care about ourselves. It may be natural to care more about me and mine, but it may not be moral to care more about me and mine—and the Christian God that I worship doesn’t always tell me what comes naturally to me in times of stress is okay. Or maybe He does more often than I think. This isn’t always one hundred percent clear. But what has become to clear to me over the years is that it’s usually not okay with Him that I stop and hold with whatever attitude washes over me first. I’m supposed to stop and consider and change my attitude if that’s what’s called for.

If I truly believe that war is a bad thing, even though God has sometimes indicated that war is necessary thing, that He still hates it when human blood is spilled and still hates war, then I have to know the quality and quantity of the thing I am resisting, hating, avoiding along with Him. That means that I have to know what war costs. That means I have to know what’s happening, not only to me and mine, but to them and theirs too.

Furthermore, I think that turning away from the sum total of what’s been lost, turning away from the total number of people killed, is the same as turning away from exactly how ugly a thing war is. And I think that makes war more attractive than it should be as a solution to problems.

THE IRAQI BODY COUNTS

Last week, a study by the World Health Organization puts the number of Iraqi civilian violent deaths at 151,000.

Last year, on September 14th 2007, the ORB (Opinion Research Business), an independent polling agency located in London, published estimates of that the total war casualties in Iraq were over 1.2 million.

In 2006, the Lancet Study, conducted by Johns Hopkins University and the Al-Mustansiriya University in Baghdad, reported the Iraqi civilian violent death toll at 601,000, with another 50,000 dying of disease, etc.

I tend to disbelieve the 151,000 number collected by Iraqi government officials, as in the case of the World Health Organization Study, because the Iraqi citizenry are likely to tell government officials whatever it takes to make them feel safe—not (necessarily) the truth about why cousin so-and-so was so far from home in the first place when he got killed. And way over here in the U.S. we just don’t know how much or how little it takes to be accused of being an “insurgent” or the associate of an "insurgent" these days.

Yet, whatever the number of dead actually turns out to be at the end of the Iraq war, I want to hear the estimates—not for the Iraqis sake but for our own. And I hope we all do because it seems obvious to me that accuracy wasn’t the final determining factor in the decision to report the number of dead in the days and weeks after 9/11, how much we cared was.

What's more, keeping track of the number of dead, ours and theirs, is part of facing up to what we’ve done as a country, accidentally or neglectfully. Everybody knows, especially Christians, that turning away from the inequities within oneself is a prescription for disaster. And if that is true for the individual, then it is true for us as a group of people called Americans.