Posted on March 24, 2008 - by Venik

US Navy: 4000 dead US soldiers in Iraq is a milestone

Four US soldiers were killed in Iraq on March 23, 2008 by a roadside bomb, bringing the number of officially acknowledged US military casualties in Iraq to 4,000. It is important to underscore the “officially acknowledged” part: the Department of Defense chooses not to count all US casualties in Iraq the same way.

Basically, if a US soldier was killed in combat in Iraq, or wounded and died from injuries while still in Iraq, that’s an official combat loss. On the other hand, if a wounded soldier was transported to, say, the US base in the neighboring Bahrain or back to the States, and died there, his death is not included in the official tally. The situation is the same if a soldier died in an accident that did not occur in the course of a combat operation.

Furthermore, casualties among civilian and paramilitary contractors are also omitted from the official total. As you can see, this accounting of death business can get a bit tricky, so the official 4,000 casualties milestone reached yesterday in Iraq is really just a round number on paper that has little significance. And the US military spokesman Rear Admiral Greg Smith acknowledges this sad fact:

“It is artificial in the sense that somehow the 4,000th tragic loss somehow will be different from the first. I don’t want to say that we shouldn’t recognize that as a milestone. It’s something that we’re not focused on and certainly not going to attribute any more or any less to than any other soldier’s death.”

It’s really hard to tell what exactly Smith was trying to say here – that the US military thinks death of four thousand soldiers is no more significant that the death of a single soldier; or that, perhaps, the death of four thousand soldiers is just as acceptable – one thing he made perfectly clear: the 4,000 dead US troops in Iraq is a milestone. A milestone on a road to where? Rear Admiral Smith did not elaborate, nor did he mention how many more miles we have to go.

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