Return of the Body Count?

[NNN0LHI]

http://news.yahoo.com/s/thenation/20061027/cm_thenation/15133108

<snip>Byron York of the National Review was there and wrote a revealing piece Wednesday about the President's growing frustration over Iraq. It seems that the man who, in December 2005, finally offered a cumulative (unbelievably low-ball) body count of 30,000 for all Iraqi deaths by violence since 2003 and then "stood by" that same number almost 11 bloody months later, was most frustrated that he couldn't offer the American people a real, notch-on-the-gun, continuous measure of "progress" in Iraq -- just how many enemies we were knocking off there regularly. "We don't get to say," said Bush, in what was evidently an outburst of irritation, "that -- a thousand of the enemy killed, or whatever the number was. It's happening. You just don't know it."

And why exactly can't the President reveal that proud -- and obviously high -- figure to us when, as he said, comparing Iraq to World War II (where progress was so much easier to measure), there are so few other indices of success? He was willing to reveal just why for the first time in this passage from the York piece:


"'We have made a conscious effort not to be a body-count team,' Bush said, in a clear reference to the tabulations of enemy killed that became a hallmark of the Vietnam War. And that, in turn, "gives you the impression that are just there -- kind of moving around, directing traffic, and somebody takes a shot at them and they're down."


So now we know. This can officially be declared the anti-Vietnam, anti-body count war. The President has told us so. And it's darn frustrating for a man who, according to the Washington Post's Bob Woodward, once kept in his Oval Office desk drawer "his own personal scorecard for the war" in the form of photographs with brief biographies and personality sketches of those judged to be the world's most dangerous terrorists--each ready to be crossed out by the President as his forces took them down. And a man who is truly frustrated, well, he just has to vent sometime, doesn't he? Perhaps, since so much else from the Vietnam era has returned to haunt us, it's time for the official return of the body count or, as Donald Rumsfeld likes to call all the measuring the administration does behind the scenes, the "metrics" of "success."