Posted on 10/23/2005 8:19:35 PM PDT by jmc1969
Eager to demonstrate success in Iraq, the U.S. military has abandoned its previous refusal to publicize enemy body counts and now cites such numbers periodically to show the impact of some counterinsurgency operations.
The revival of body counts, a practice discredited during the Vietnam War, has apparently come without formal guidance from the Pentagon's leadership. Military spokesmen in Washington and Baghdad said they knew of no written directive detailing the circumstances under which such figures should be released or the steps that should be taken to ensure accuracy.
Instead, they described an ad hoc process that has emerged over the past year, with authority to issue death tolls pushed out to the field and down to the level of division staffs.
In May, Air Force Gen. Richard B. Myers, then-chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, mentioned the killing of 250 of insurgent leader Abu Musab Zarqawi's "closest lieutenants" as evidence of progress in Iraq.
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
Damned if they do, damned if they don't.
Good.
The Lib media has been citing death counts of our own with bloody delight. About time proper context is supplied by citing how many of the enemy were taken down for every one we lose. Should have happened far earlier.
This is what they've been doing all along, there is no "change".
There is no "news" in this report. The sole purpose of publishing this piece is to link "Iraq" and "Viet Nam" as much as the MSM possibly can, as a part of the constant drumbeat to try to sap public support for the military mission.
The MSM is trying to run the same playbook as VN:
- convince the public we are losing the war in the field
- weaken the administration by hyping scandals
- take back the congress
- once in control of congress, pull the plug on the military mission and cut our allies off at the knees
- when the enemy wins, the lefties proclaim that they were right along, the war was never winnable, and the academic left enshrines this version of history into the textbooks.
Wierd, now we loose if we give out numbers?
Someone tell me again that the press is not on the side of the enemy.
Is that SOB MacNamara back in charge.
Our military is designed to break things and kill the enemy. We get the 'break things' occasionally but the only part about killing is how many of our troops died in the line of duty.
I want to know the enemy death tolls and I want the enemy to know the same. You can bet your sweet ass they don't hear that count from their own people.
Only the MSM has the moral right to broadcast body counts and only those of U.S. soldiers and only to denigrate what a good job they are doing and try to make them seem incompentent.
In fact our military should not only talk about enemy casualties but they should change their policies and show footage of us killing large numbers of the terrorists in the battlefield.
More body count stats.
That is, if we can survive their heinous influence!
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