Something I find interesting about the war in Iraq....
 

Generally speaking, unless I am horribly mistaken, pervious wars were measured in terms of casualties. This is why if you look up any world war two/world war 1/civil war/vietnam war battle, to my kowledge, they will usually list casualty counts, over "number of dead counts." Now, a casualty is


Main Entry: ca·su·al·ty
Pronunciation: 'ka-zh&l-tE, 'kazh-w&l-, 'ka-zh&-w&l-
Function: noun
Inflected Form(s): plural -ties
1 archaic : CHANCE, FORTUNE <losses that befall them by mere casualty -- Sir Walter Raleigh>
2 : serious or fatal accident : DISASTER
3 a : a military person lost through death, wounds, injury, sickness, internment, or capture or through being missing in action.b : a person or thing injured, lost, or destroyed : VICTIM <the ex-senator was a casualty of the last election>

So, why then, whenever we look at reports for battles/engagements/total combat losses, we see only the dead numbers....and not casualty counts? Well, casualty counts are generally several times greater than the number of dead, as seems to be the case in Iraq. Altho 2000 or so have been killed, from what I hear, around 15,000 have been wounded. So that means we have around 17,000 casualties. Lets eliminate some, because not all injuries constitute as a casualty. So lets just say we have 10,000 casualties. And yet, they dont tell us the casualites, merely teh number of dead....possibly to make the people less restless about the war? I don't know for sure, but it seems kind of strange to me that all of a sudden we are measuring combat losses in number of deaths over casualties. Altho, it is a pretty smart thing to do if you want to give people the impression that the war is smaller/more minor then it actually is.

I'll give you credit for thinking, even though that's a really unrealistic and far-fetched theory. I think some people might get confused over what a 'casualty' and a 'death' is. For instance, I found this site:

http://www.secondworldwar.co.uk/casualty.html

Even though it says 'casualty' in the URL, it states clearly on the bottom of the page that these figures are for the dead only.

true, the definition of casualty may be misinterpreted, however, I hold to my original statement.... The news mentions the number of dead, but never once have I heard numbers pretaining to the real definition of a casualty. Maybe the common person may not know the difference between the two, but I would hope that our news agencies would know better. You must agree, 10,000 casualties(kia, mia, injured, sick, etc.) sounds a lot worse than 2,000 deaths.