Joseph L. Galloway
is the senior military correspondent for Knight Ridder Newspapers and a nationally syndicated columnist.
One of America's preeminent war correspondents,
with more than four decades as a reporter
and writer, he recently concluded an assignment
as a special consultant to Gen. Colin Powell
at the State Department.
Galloway, a native of Refugio, Texas, spent
22 years as a foreign and war correspondent
and bureau chief for United Press International,
and nearly 20 years as a senior editor and
senior writer for U.S. News & World Report
magazine. His overseas postings include tours
in Japan, Vietnam, Indonesia, India, Singapore
and three years as UPI bureau chief in Moscow
in the former Soviet Union. During the course
of 15 years of foreign postings Galloway served
four tours as a war correspondent in Vietnam
and also covered the 1971 India-Pakistan War
and half a dozen other combat operations.
In 1990-1991 Galloway covered Desert Shield/Desert
Storm, riding with the 24th Infantry Division
(Mech) in the assault into Iraq. General H.
Norman Schwarzkopf has called Galloway "The
finest combat correspondent of our generation
-- a soldier's reporter and a soldier's friend."
WASHINGTON - (KRT) - The war in Iraq,
which the Bush administration believed would end more than a year
ago, reached a somber and costly milestone this week when the number
of Americans killed there passed the 1,000 mark and the number of
wounded neared 7,000. Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld warned
that the level of violence is increasing, not decreasing.
That the adventure in Iraq amounts to a blank check on the national
treasury and an unending drain on the lives of our soldiers and Marines
is no longer in question.
A thousand of our nation's finest troops are dead. Seven thousand
more are wounded, half of them seriously enough they were not returned
to combat, and many of those with smashed or amputated limbs from
the blasts of homemade bombs and mines. An operation that its advocates
and planners predicted would be over in six months and paid for with
Iraq's oil revenues drags on with no end in sight, costing the American
taxpayer more than $100 billion a year.
Rumsfeld and Joint Chiefs chairman Gen. Richard Myers said the "recent
spike'' in American casualties reflects an enemy that's becoming much
more sophisticated and adaptive in their attacks.
Painting Iraq as a critical part of America's global war on terror,
Rumsfeld made it clear that war should and would continue for as long
as it takes. He said the war didn't begin on Sept.
11, 2001, or when the United States invaded Iraq last year, but
dated back to the Beirut Marine barracks bombing in 1982.
Rumsfeld said the thousand American dead in Iraq are only part of
a toll that numbers in the thousands, or tens of thousands, in two
decades. The fight must go on despite the sacrifice of all those lives,
he added.
Then the defense secretary, perhaps hoping to soften the impact of
all those dead Americans, gave a very rare body count estimate of
between 1,500 and 2,500 enemy killed in Iraq last month. By offering
a body count for August, Rumsfeld violated the unwritten rule of every
administration and a generation of military leaders to avoid giving
such counts.
In Vietnam, the body count became notorious as the only way to measure
and reward success in an unending guerrilla war. The pressure for
ever-higher counts of enemy killed, in turn, corrupted junior commanders
in the field who routinely inflated or simply made up body counts
that would make their superiors happy.
An earlier defense secretary, Robert S. McNamara, was a data addict.
The chief numbers cruncher, who knew the cost of everything and the
worth of nothing, was himself captured by the body counts. At last
he had something quantifiable out of Vietnam. But McNamara forgot
that old saw: Figures don't lie, but liars can figure. And a newer
computer-era saw: GIGO -- garbage in, garbage out.
Take the new Iraq numbers. If, as Gen. John Abizaid, the head of the
U.S. Central Command, has said, the total insurgent strength in Iraq
is now only 5,000, and if Rumsfeld's high-end number is correct and
2,500 of the enemy were killed in August, then just one more month
and the enemy will all be dead and we can go home. Right?
Would that it were so. When you fight in urban terrain, in the streets
and alleyways of cities teeming with people, the killing you do today
breeds new enemies tomorrow. Galloway's rule of thumb is that for
every enemy you kill in a guerrilla war, you create two new ones.
Worse, machine guns and tank guns and Bradley chain guns and Air Force
and Marine bombs inevitably kill the innocent as well as the guilty.
The ordnance destroys homes and automobiles and the pitiful possessions
of the dispossessed, and it creates even more recruits to the war
against the Americans. You blow up my house and kill my mother, and
I will soon be waiting on a rooftop with an AK-47 and an RPG launcher
and hatred in my heart for all Americans.
This is why the main emphasis in counter-insurgency warfare is, or
should be, on the political side of political-military operations.
This is why there can be no purely military solution in Iraq. This
is why, until and unless some political solution is found, Americans
and their allies will continue to be maimed and killed in Iraq on
a daily basis.
