Bush Officially Embraces Vietnam-Era Strategy Of Publicizing Enemy Body Counts In Iraq

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Thu Dec-14-06 04:46 PM
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Bush Officially Embraces Vietnam-Era Strategy Of Publicizing Enemy Body Counts In Iraq

Bush Officially Embraces Vietnam-Era Strategy Of Publicizing Enemy Body Counts In Iraq

In late October, Bush told a group of conservative journalists that the administration had made a decision not to report the number of Iraqis killed by the U.S. military. The publication of those figures was widely seen as a counter-productive strategy during the Vietnam War

Today, Tony Snow announced that the administration had reversed course and would be publicizing body counts to disabuse people of the notion that �our people aren�t doing anything� in Iraq.

QUESTION: Why did he decide to give enemy body counts, something that they generally try to stay away from?

SNOW: Well, that�s a good question. I won�t try to � rather than trying to tell you why the president said what he said, because I can�t put him on the couch right now, what I can do is at least offer one possible reason why that�s an important data point for Americans, which is � there�s a lot of concern about U.S. casualties and deaths, as there should be: 103 deaths in October alone.

SNOW: And there is quite often the impression � and I�ve talked about it up here � that our people aren�t doing anything; they�re just targets.

And I think there�s a certain amount of unease in the American public because they hear about deaths, but they don�t hear about what�s going on.

I was speaking last night with a service member, just recently back. He was at our party.

And he�s frustrated because a lot of the activities that they do never get reported.

One of the things that never seems to be counterposed to the death counts is what our service men and women are doing. And one of the things they�re doing is they�re fighting the bad guys.

And as General Chiarelli said recently, bad guys haven�t won a single battle.

For obvious reasons, going back to the Vietnam era, people are loathed to do body counts, but it probably is worth at least giving a general impression of the relative battlefield success of what�s going on, which is a great many members of Al Qaida in Anbar, and also, people who are committing acts of violence in Baghdad and elsewhere, are dying or being captured as a result of these military activities.

QUESTION: Is this something, then, the White House would like to the American public to judge: We killed this many bad guys versus how many of us are killed? Is that something you want as a metric from now on?

SNOW: I don�t know. But I think the most important � I think it is important that Americans learn as much as possible about what�s going on in Iraq.

And that�s not merely militarily � to get a sense of where the violence is located, how widespread it is, what�s going on in civil society. Is there hope in certain provinces? What is the full picture in Iraq?

.......Video and Transcript here........

http://thinkprogress.org/2006/12/14/bush-body-counts/