There have been 643 coalition deaths in the Iraq war as of February 24, 2004... 548 Americans, 59 Britons, five Bulgarians, one Dane, 17 Italians, two Poles, eight Spaniards, two Thai and one Ukrainian. If you go to this site, you can find their names, ages, unit, hometown, and details surrounding their deaths.
What you won't find there,or at any other American news agency website, is a list of the names of the innocent Iraqi civilians killed. Instead, these human beings have been gathered up into the vilest of military euphemistic receptacles, collateral damage, as if they were just so many broken dishes we knocked over by accident, and swept under the rug of this country's consciousness.
Of course, our government would never put it in quite that way, and to be fair, I know that the young men and women enlisting in this war did so with the intention of saving innocent lives. Unfortunately, no matter the intention, innocent lives will always be lost in a war, no matter how justified anyone believes it is. The justification for this particular war, I'll deal with elsewhere. For now, there needs to be a place where those who suffered so long under the brutal rule of Saddam Hussein, and now through the continued horrors of war, are acknowledged. Where the deaths of those we were supposedly sent to liberate are honored and grieved for at least as much as those who were sent to liberate them.
Unfortunately we don't have a list of their names.
The numbers are debatable. The U.S. and British governments don't keep track. Dr Nagham Mohsen, an official at the Iraqi Health Ministry, was compiling casualty figures from official hospital records until December of 2003. According to an Associated Press report, she was then ordered by her immediate superior to stop collecting this information. No explanation was given, and whatever information she had collected seems to have vanished.
Government numbers will probably be manipulated anyway, depending on the government and the 'spin' you want to create about this war. Iraq Body Count, an independent group of British and US academics and researchers, has put the total somewhere between 8245 and 10, 089 at present count, but even that quantification doesn't put a human face to the tragedy.
There is one person, a young woman from California named Marla Ruzicka, who has traveled to Iraq and made it her mission to go house to house to do just that. "Yes, a number is important," she said, "but it's not as important as making sure that we recognize that each number is a life." You can visit her website here.
Unless and until we fully acknowledge and grieve for the nameless many who have suffered and died as a result of this war and all others, the senseless brutality of war as a viable solution to any problem will continue. The death and distruction will continue and merely fuel further hatred and violent retribution.
This page is to honor the nameless victims of this war. This page is a voice no longer heard amongst us asking, "was it worth it?"
