What's the Story Behind 30,000 Iraqi Deaths?

In practice, there is a hierarchy of counting: U.S. soldiers come first, the bad guys we kill come second, the innocent people the bad guys kill come third, and the innocent people we kill come last. In October, the Pentagon released an estimate that insurgents had killed or wounded 26,000 Iraqis -- soldiers, police and civilians -- since January.

To be fair, there are often real constraints. For one thing, the method and scale of harm varies greatly: deaths in discrete checkpoint incidents are easier to tally than casualties caused by indirect fires during offensive operations. Distinguishing between civilians and combatants can also be a challenge. Yet the single biggest impediment to operational analysis of civilian harm remains fear of "the number" -- fear that the body count would become the standard for judging the military's performance. The civilian death toll has literally been off the books, the issue no one has been willing to see.

The military cannot learn without looking inside the numbers, plumbing deeper to understand the causes of noncombatant deaths. The real value lies in dissecting them and considering, where U.S. forces killed civilians, whether alternative weaponry or actions might have made a difference.

This challenge is especially critical for ground forces, which are inflicting significant civilian harm for the first time since Vietnam. Today, the Army and Marine Corps could study scenarios in which civilians are particularly vulnerable -- checkpoints, artillery barrages and raids -- both to develop long-range alternatives or to do immediate fixes in the field. Only by grappling directly with civilian deaths can the military realize its intention of preventing them. This is the real power of the president's number.

Let's not expect the Pentagon or the president to keep a perfect score. Let's not quibble at the margins of a total that, by any honest admission, remains unfathomable. But if war is too important to be left to the generals, then war's effect on civilians is too important to be left to the pacifists. Welcome the president's acknowledgment of a civilian death toll. It can help the nation better match its capabilities to its intentions and reckon more honestly with a military force that is all too easy to use.

What's in a number? Accountability.

Author's e-mail: sarah_sewall@harvard.edu

Sarah Sewall is a lecturer at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. She served as deputy assistant secretary of defense for peacekeeping during the Clinton administration.