The Numbers Game in War.

The latest homicide bomber kills at least 24 including children. This was not collateral damage. No smart bombs are used here. These monsters target their own women and children. They have no sense of conscience.

It's really important that we understand that.

This site-Iraq Body Count, clearly a left leaning one, says (referring to civilian deaths) that there were "up to 7,350 deaths which resulted from coalition military action during the "major-combat" phase prior to May 1st 2003." Let's just take that number at face value for arguments sake. They also say, "On the 2nd anniversary of the Coalition invasion of Iraq, media-reported civilian deaths are approaching 20,000." It goes on to explain the figure banded about by leftwing bloggers:

"The Lancet study's headline figure of "100,000" excess deaths is a probabilistic projection from a small number of reported deaths."

Keep in mind that of the over of 7000 deaths that occurred during the invasion there is no doubt that our military did everything humanly possible to prevent civilian casualties. Even at the expense of their own lives.

So the over 14,000 deaths that have occurred since then, we can safely say that almost all of them were actually murdered by insurgents. This is a distinction that I have yet to see someone using ANY of the number of deaths use. It's an important distinction. Throwing around the number of civilian deaths as if it is our soldiers doing the killing is reprehensible to me and done far too often on the blogs. It is an insult to our soldiers and to our country.

We need to understand something. As awful as anything we may do in war, we do our best to abide by the rules of engagement and those who don't are punished. We aren't perfect, but we sure as hell don't saw innocent people's heads off on video for the world to see. We don't strap bombs to ourselves and drive into a group of children taking candy from soldiers.

So when I hear the number of Iraq civilian deaths being used again without making the distinction of WHO is doing the killing, I will call them on it and I expect you to do the same.

*crossposted at UPC