Just Something to Think About

May 1st marked the sixth anniversary of President Bush’s declaration of “mission accomplished” in Iraq.

I’m not quite sure what mission that was – and we’re still there, of course. But I don’t want to focus on that now.

What I want to focus on is the human cost of war – something which I don’t believe has been given adequate coverage in the media or adequate consideration by all involved.

The number that we are all pretty familiar with – and which has been given most of the press – is the number 4284. That is the number of American soldiers who have died in Iraq as of May 3rd, 2009.

And that is a tragedy.

But what doesn’t get much press are the 91,679 – 100,086 civilians – many of whom were women and children – who are officially documented to have died violent deaths as a result of this invasion.

These numbers don’t include combat deaths. These were just regular people who got caught in the crossfire or whose houses were bombed and who happened to be officially counted as among the dead.

And these numbers aren’t estimates – the estimates go as high as more than half a million dead.

And none of these numbers reflects the devastating injuries many of the living suffer with for the rest of their lives – including the injury of losing a loved one, or perhaps more than one loved one, because of this war.

But these are just numbers on a page, and as I have pointed out in some of my other posts, one of the limitations most people have is the inability to comprehend large numbers.

So I will try and put into perspective what approximately 100,000 people looks like (I’m going to stick to the low end of the numbers for argument’s sake).

If you live in small city in America, say Waynesboro Virginia where my wife used to have family, the equivalent number of deaths would be… everybody…
Times five.

If you live in a fairly large city like Green Bay Wisconsin or Berkeley California or Cambridge Massachusetts, the number of deaths would, again, be everybody.

And if the higher estimates are correct, we could be talking about the entire populations of cities like Washington DC, Baltimore MD, Boston MA, or Las Vegas NV.

Just something to think about.