counting bodies -- theirs

Then:

"We don't do body counts on other people," Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said in November 2003, when asked on "Fox News Sunday" whether the number of enemy dead exceeded the U.S. toll.

Now:

"For a discrete operation, it's a metric that can help convey magnitude and context," said Bryan Whitman, a senior Pentagon spokesman.

Today in The Washington Post a report (with the punning title "Enemy Body Counts Revived" -- tee-hee!) that our military has changed its mind about the enemy dead in Iraq, has decided to start counting them after all -- at least when we slaughter them in big bunches. This to impress the American public that ours is a Can-Do kind of military (in the killing department at any rate) and to signal "progress" in the war in Iraq. As if there is a finite number of enemy over there and every one we kill brings us a step closer to total victory.

Is there anyone still naive enough to buy this? Anyone who doubts that such mass slaughter will fuel anti-American sentiment, serve as a recruiting tool for the resistance, increase the number of enemy exponentially? Is there anyone whose attention will be distracted by this body count from our own troop death toll --closing in on 2,000 combat deaths?

This counting up of enemy dead, discredited after the debacle that was the Vietnam War, a sure symptom that our current war effort is -- to coin a phrase -- in its last throes. Time to get the Humvee out of Dodge.

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Also in the Washington Post report:

In May, Air Force Gen. Richard B. Myers, then-chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, mentioned the killing of 250 of insurgent leader Abu Musab Zarqawi's "closest lieutenants" as evidence of progress in Iraq.

Myers went on: "These were the 250 lieutenants who grew up on the same block as Zarqawi, attended the same grade school, played on the same soccer team, dated the same girl, and served as best men at his wedding. You know, his mates."