To the Editor:
The Dartmouth always publishes the previous day's closing numbers of the Dow Jones, NASDAQ and S&P 500 stock market averages. These numbers are news, but news that is available every day from virtually every other daily print, media, and electronic news source in the United States. As someone who teaches American economic and business history I recognize the significance of these daily stock market statistics to some people in the public including some Dartmouth students. But I wonder if you wouldn't do most of your student readers an even greater service by also providing them with at least weekly updated numbers that you cannot find in most of our other daily news sources.
I am referring of course to casualty counts from America's war in Iraq. Let me give you some examples and the reliable sources from which they have been available for the past two years.
To date 1,942 uniformed Americans have been killed in Iraq, including 48 female soldiers. My source is www.icasualties.org, a site that provides detailed information on each casualty and every deadly incident.
It is perhaps of some interest that according to this source, so far 73 percent of these dead have been Euro-Americans, 11 percent Hispanic/Latino, 11 percent Afro-American, 2 percent Asian-American and 1 percent Native American; a distribution that suggests race in not a factor in determining which Americans have been made dead forever in Iraq. It therefore seems likely that a similar pattern emerges among the 14,904 American military personnel who have been wounded in Iraq.
The same source also reports casualties among America's allies in Iraq. These include 96 British and 102 other coalition soldiers killed, as well as 3,994 dead from the Iraqi security forces. In addition, 52 journalists have been killed so far while reporting on the warfare in Iraq.
No one seems to know how many Iraqi civilians have been wounded, and the United States government has refused to count civilians killed. But the international website iraqbodycount.net is tracking those civilians reported by different independent sources as killed. This site currently counts as many as 29,653 civilians killed. It has also broken down responsiblity for these civilian deaths, finding that as of this summer U.S. military forces have killed the largest number, 37 percent of all civilians made dead by what is clearly not precision warfare Iraq.
Finally, your readers might be interested in the dollar cost of the Iraq war. A running total of money actually spent is posted by the National Priorities Project at costofwar.com. On this site the number rolls by so fast you cannot keep up with it. Today the total reached $199,000,000,000.
The cost of war website also permits you to click on buttons that translate the dollars spent on the war in Iraq into opportunity costs. Let one example suffice. To date our government has spent on the Iraq war a sum sufficient to pay for more than 9,643,000 full four-year scholarships to public universities and colleges. Can we imagine an America that would be up to making this choice? Can we further imagine 10 percent of those scholarships going to peace studies and conflict resolution majors? In other words, can we imagine instead of the bloody counts from Iraq described above, an army of 964,000 American peacemakers deployed around this country and the world.
