(Rainy) thoughts on domestic tourism

Muslims transforming the world

Southeast Asia's Strongmen(2)

Southeast Asia's Strongmen(1)

Body counts

"WE don't do body counts," General Tommy Franks of the US Central Command, which directs the war in Iraq, was once quoted as saying. Now it's the American press that's doing the body counts, reporting on the steadily increasing number of American soldiers dying in combat.

The last time I wrote about Iraq in mid-October, the US troops killed numbered 338. As of last weekend, the casualties had exceeded 400.

Bush reacted last month, chastising the American mass media for concentrating on negative news rather than on the benefits Iraqis have gained since the Americans occupied their country. But the American mass media have actually been quite selective with their counts, rarely mentioning Iraqi casualties. Yet it is this growing toll of Iraqi lives that explains why the US is now in a quagmire, caught in a low-intensity conflict that could drag on for years, while claiming more and more lives of US troops. (I'm feeling awkward using the terms "American" and "US" here because, as I've pointed out in several columns, many of the troops deployed there aren't even American citizens. They include immigrants from many countries, including the Philippines.)

On Sunday my mother asked me why the Iraqis were reacting with such ferocity against the Americans. She is part of an older generation that still remembers when the Americans returned in 1945 to "liberate" Filipinos. While there was joy in Baghdad's streets when Saddam Hussein was overthrown, the Iraqi welcome for the US troops wasn't quite as warm, and over the last few months, hostility to the "liberators" has grown.

Last month an American research group called Project on Defense Alternatives (PDA) released estimates on Iraqi casualties, based on US military statistics, news reports, hospital records and surveys. The report says that between 10,800 and 15,100 Iraqis were killed during the first month of the US invasion alone, almost half of the deaths occurring during the assault on Baghdad. PDA estimates up to 4,300 of the casualties were civilian noncombatants.

I remember receiving an angry e-mail last year from a Filipino-American reacting to one of my anti-war columns. Apparently, he was working for the US defense establishment and he went to great lengths pointing out how precise their weapons were now, and that this would minimize civilian deaths or what the Pentagon calls "collateral damage." So much for that claim.

That initial invasion killed about 20 percent of Saddam's troops-quite a small number because many deserted. About 5,000 hardcore Saddam supporters are now believed to be behind the insurgency against the US troops.

The figure of 5,000, which comes from a senior American official in the Middle East, General John P. Abizaid, may seem small, especially when you look at the number of US troops deployed in Iraq, now averaging about 140,000. But the insurgents have civilian support, and this is the nightmare for the US troops, the possibility of a protracted guerrilla war.

The death toll did not end with the initial invasion. Iraqi Body Count (IBC), another research group composed of Americans and British, has also been using hospital records and surveys to monitor casualties. IBC estimates that between Apr. 14 and Aug. 31 this year, some 1,500 Iraqis, mostly civilians, have died in Baghdad from the continuing armed conflict.

Numbers numb. Imagine the streets of Baghdad right after the US troops' assault, with the dead and injured. We have to try to understand, too, what it means to be occupied by a foreign power. Occasionally, we get a glimpse with footage on CNN or BBC of US troops conducting their night raids -- the latest US campaign has been named Operation Iron Hammer -- kicking doors open and storming into homes.

I remember how, during our own martial law regime under Ferdinand Marcos, terrified people were in rural areas about possible military raids, which were quite common in areas suspected to harbor rebels. One night in a village in the northern mountain province of Kalinga, I watched as a child went into a temper tantrum, wailing like it was the end of the world and then suddenly falling silent when his mother began to bang on the walls of their huts while chanting, "Solchacho, solchacho," the Kalinga way of pronouncing "soldado" or soldier.

All eathat fear was in reaction to fellow Filipinos. Imagine now how American troops look to Baghdad residents. No, it's not quite the same as Liberation in Manila at the end of World War II in 1945.

I don't like body counts either, but sometimes it helps to look at the figures, and then to try to remember the people behind the figures: the dd, and the living left behind. It helps, as well, to remember that what's happening in Iraq happened a century earlier in the Philippines, when the United States set out to "liberate" us from Spain. The Philippine-American War dragged on for many years, a simmering low-intensity conflict. It could have happened all over again in Mindanao, if we had allowed US troops to come in last year as combatants.