The Human Cost of War

Before I get into the news today, I want to bring up something that's been on my mind a lot in the past few days. We understand that there are currently 168,000 American troops serving in Iraq. Numbers like that have been bandied about for a while now, especially with all the recent discussion of the troop surge and how we're going to try to get those soldiers back out of Iraq. That's a huge number of human beings, many of whom are living every day with bombs going off around them.

But after I started really thinking about it, that number isn't the whole story. In the spring, we'll pass the fifth anniversary of the occupation of Iraq, and the 168,000 troops we have there now haven't been there the whole time. For all the talk about how the military is "stretched" and "strained," the specifics of that never really get laid out for us. How many people have served in the war in Iraq? Cox has an article from March (at the beginning of the surge) stating that there is no number solely for Iraq, but there is a joint number between Iraq and Afghanistan.

1,500,000.

According to suspicious source Wikipedia, "Approximately 1,426,713 personnel are currently on active duty in the military with an additional 1,259,000 personnel in the seven reserve components.

So what they mean, really, by "stretched," is that "there's a really shitty party in Iraq and everyone's invited."

I'm currently looking into getting updated statistics on how many troops have served and how many tours those soldiers have been on, but I just wanted to give you an idea of exactly what this war is costing in human currency: not in lives lost, but in lives scarred in battle, in husbands/wives/parents/children waiting at home and praying that their loved ones come home smiling and not dead or wounded, of upstanding citizens that could be safe at home with us instead of fighting tooth and nail in the desert for . . . [Editor's note: this sentence will be completed when someone gives us a satisfactory explanation of what this fight is about]. Since George W. Bush's presidency began, we have ONE AND A HALF MILLION NEW VETERANS OF FOREIGN WARS. And no declaration of war.

P.S. -- "Furthermore: "About one in five of U.S. troops injured in Iraq have suffered serious wounds such as loss of a limb or an eye, massive burns, spinal or head damage or other potentially debilitating injury."