Return of the Five O'Clock Follies -- Now Through the Looking Glass

[EddyTeddyFreddy]

Those of you who, like me, came of age during the Vietnam War will doubtless recall with varying degrees of fond contempt a recurring treat at the daily press briefings known as the Five O’Clock Follies: the body count.

The high command in Saigon in those long-ago days seized on a strategy of attrition – we will kill far more of them than they kill of us – and then to prove the efficacy of their fatally flawed strategy demanded body counts every time gunfire erupted in the jungle.

GIs ordered to comb the gloom of a battlefield counting bodies joked that they would, at times, tally up the arms and legs and divide by four. Whatever number they reported often grew like Jack’s beanstalk as it climbed the chain of command.

That led to straight-faced colonels at the daily press briefing in Saigon, dubbed, not without cause, the “Five O’Clock Follies,” reporting that 96 enemy were killed by body count, and 12 weapons were recovered.

A logical response was: “The hell you say.”

Well! Never let it be said that the policy-makers of the Pentagon are incapable of learning from experience:

In the wake of Vietnam, American military commanders, from Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf in the Gulf War to Gen. Tommy Ray Franks in the early part of the Iraq war, refused to play the body count game. Franks told reporters: “We don’t do body counts.” Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld echoed this in the fall of 2003 on a Sunday show on cable television: “We don’t do body counts on other people.”

Some of you, dear readers, may be leaping to your keyboards now, pounding out angry rebuttals: “But body counts are being waved at us as measures of success in Iraq! You been into the catnip again, ETF?”

Pish-tosh. True it is that our commanders in the field have fallen back into old bad habits of counting terminated (with extreme prejudice) insurgents. Or what they decide are insurgents, anyway. But civilian casualties? Nope. None of this body count foolishness there. Or, shall we say, alternatively defined when quantified as a measure of how successful a recent security offensive in Baghdad has been:

The U.S. military did not count people killed by bombs, mortars, rockets or other mass attacks when it reported a dramatic drop in the number of murders in the Baghdad area last month, the U.S. command said Monday.

The decision to include only victims of drive-by shootings and those killed by torture and execution, usually at the hands of death squads, allowed U.S. officials to argue that a security crackdown that began in the capital August 7 had more than halved the city’s murder rate.

But the types of slayings, including suicide bombings, that the U.S. excluded from the category of “murder” were not made explicit at the time. That led to confusion after Iraqi Health Ministry figures showed that 1,536 people died violently in and around Baghdad in August, nearly the same number as in July.

Now, before you cavil at such mendacity, consider this: Could this, perhaps, be the beginning of our exit strategy? Will we redefine reality thoroughly enough to declare victory and go home?

One can only observe and wonder.

[elucidator]

A couple of corrections. First off, there is no reason to assume that these deaths are largely due to the insurgency. Quite the opposite, actually. The insurgency, as you know, is comprised almost entirely of foreign fighters and Saddam dead-enders. (The Leader said so, so don’t start in with any of this “cite?” crap! If you loved freedom, that would be enough for you!) Murders might have any number of motives, only some of which are political. Adultery, for instance. Maybe, in their culture, the prescribed response to adultery is to tie the offending parties hands behind his back and park one in his brain-pan.

Organized crime is another. Maybe we are misinterpreting Shia and Sunni “death squads” for the al-Barzini crime family! When order breaks down, oftimes improvisational governments fill in the vacuum. Same thing happened in Russia, after St. Ronnie of Bakersfield freed them, for a while they were at the mercy of any number of home-grown mafia, until thier culture advanced to the state of iron autocracy that gives investors the comfort and security they crave.

But in the meantime, these local exuberant entreprenuers are “sorting out” their business relationships in time-honored fashion! Got to expect oodles of excess corpses while that process plays out!

[EddyTeddyFreddy]

@elucidator

But in the meantime, these local exuberant entreprenuers are “sorting out” their business relationships in time-honored fashion! Got to expect oodles of excess corpses while that process plays out!

But isn’t it God’s job to sort 'em out? Or does that just apply to the ones we kill?

:dubious:

[if6was9]

I was born in 1962. My memories of the news, during the real dog days of Vietnam is sketchy at best. But I do remember Walter Cronkite. Reading off the American body count. EVERY. SINGLE. DAY. Talk about an exit strategy…

[Squink]

The U.S. military did not count people killed by bombs, mortars, rockets or other mass attacks when it reported a dramatic drop in the number of murders in the Baghdad area last month

Have they officialy applied these standards to the events of September 11, 2001 yet? We’ll all look pretty silly when 9/11 is redefined as ‘just a typical day during which nothing at all unusual happened’.

[ShelliBean]

@if6was9

I was born in 1962. My memories of the news, during the real dog days of Vietnam is sketchy at best. But I do remember Walter Cronkite. Reading off the American body count. EVERY. SINGLE. DAY. Talk about an exit strategy…

George Stephanopolous does this on *this week * on ABC every Sunday morning during the In Memoriam section.

[Alessan]

Do you mean that the other American newscasters don’t report the names of soldiers killed?

[yojimbo]

That wouldn’t be infotainment.

I saw a fluff piece the other night from a US network news show(repeated on a cable UK news show(with a bit of tongue in cheek) about the Flat Dad program. Which is were families get given a life size cardboard cut-out of a man with a full size pic of the soldier on it to keep the wife and kids company while the father is overseas. Now that’s infotainment

[ShelliBean]

@Alessan

Do you mean that the other American newscasters don’t report the names of soldiers killed?

The segment on this week specifically says every week “The Pentagon* released the names of 17 soldiers killed this week” then it lists them three or four at a time with name, age, rank, branch of service and (I believe) where they were killed.
While it’s not prohibited by any means, that’s not typical of a network weeknight broadcast here. Usually you would see more of that for local news about local people only.

*I don’t know if it is the Pentagon or the White House who releases these name, really.

[EddyTeddyFreddy]

@Alessan

Do you mean that the other American newscasters don’t report the names of soldiers killed?

The Boston Globe newspaper regularly prints a list of American servicemen and women killed in Iraq and Afghanistan, giving name, rank, age, home town, unit, and cause of death. It’s located on a page of the World News section among stories covering the war.

[Rufus_Xavier]

“The Pentagon today has announced that, excluding deaths by violence, accident, disease or old age, there were no deaths in Iraq today. The war is now officially over.”

[EddyTeddyFreddy]

Meanwhile, back in Baghdad:

Nearly 100 people were killed or found dead in the Iraqi capital over the past 24 hours, authorities said yesterday, continuing a wave of sectarian violence that has defied American efforts to thwart the carnage.

Sixty-two bullet-riddled corpses – all bearing signs of torture; some of them beheaded – were found dumped in streets throughout the city since Tuesday night, said Brigadier General Abdullah Mahmood of the Interior Ministry. Bombings and mortar attacks on Iraqi police killed 27 other people yesterday morning.

But not to worry. It’s not a civil war and the shining beacon of Iraq united under a peaceful, stable democracy still shines amid the darkness of the Middle East.

Or maybe not:

As the violence flared, leaders of the country’s main political parties met to seek agreement on a politically explosive plan to carve the country into a federation of three autonomous regions.

The federalism plan would create a Shi’ite region in southern Iraq much like the autonomous zone in the north controlled by the Kurds. Sunnis would be left with vast swaths of desert in the country’s middle, which lacks the oil reserves in the other regions.

Ah, progress! A wonderful thing, so long as you don’t look too closely at the direction it’s headed in.