Some Bodies Don’t Count : War: We want every American accounted for, but we shirked our duty to Iraq’s dead.

As the family members of captured or missing soldiers know all too well, the worst torment is not knowing what happened. Unfortunately, tens of thousands of Iraqi families have been condemned to a lifetime of this suffering by the U.S. command’s failure to account for the battlefield dead.

In an effort to minimize allied loss of life, the United States set out to cripple the Iraqi fighting force from the air before a ground war began. That tactic was spectacularly successful. The actual number of casualties is not known, and may never be. Only rough estimates can be given for deaths inflicted in an air barrage, and the process of identifying the dead in ground combat apparently is overwhelming. But the U.S. and allied forces in Iraq are not even attempting to comply with their obligations under the Geneva Conventions.

Articles 15 and 16 of the 1949 Conventions require belligerents to search for the dead and to record any information that might aid in their identification. Article 17 requires that bodies be buried individually in marked graves, and only after careful examination to establish identity and cause of death.

A Central Command spokesman in Riyadh told Middle East Watch, “We don’t count the bodies and we are not in the business of burying the dead.” Disposal was the Saudis’ business, he said. Nevertheless, U.S. journalists have reported seeing American and British troops shoveling the dead into shallow graves without identification or registration. Saudi military spokesmen said that their burial assistance platoons work largely under American command in the field.

Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf himself spoke candidly about the lack of accounting for enemy dead at a Feb. 27 press conference. Declaring that there never would be an exact count, the general noted: “In the days to come, you’re going to hear many, many stories, (about enemy casualty figures) either over-inflated or under-inflated, depending on who you hear them from. . . . The people who will know best, unfortunately, are the families that won’t see their loved ones come home.”

On a much smaller scale, an early version of U.S. failure to account for enemy dead was seen in the aftermath of Manuel Noriega’s ouster in Panama. U.S. officials originally insisted that there were 314 “enemy” dead, referring to soldiers or members of paramilitary battalions. Another 300 dead were presumed to be civilians. Those numbers were later revised to 150 and 202, respectively, although the Pentagon could actually identify only about 50 of the soldiers. Responding to criticism on the vagaries of the accounting process, Washington passed the responsibility onto the Panamanian authorities, and there the matter ended.

The attitude toward accounting for American dead and missing is, not surprisingly, markedly different. To this day, the United States demands that the government of Vietnam account for 2,300 Americans missing in action. The physical devastation and political turmoil of Vietnam after the war were deemed no excuse. The unresolved MIA cases have been a major impediment to normalization of relations between Vietnam and the United States.

When allied POWs taken by Iraq were displayed on television, dazed and bruised, the United States was quick to cite the Geneva Conventions and to demand Iraq’s compliance. Now that the United States has emerged from the conflict hugely victorious and allied POWs have been released, U.S. enthusiasm for the Geneva Conventions has become selective.

The attitude that the Iraqi dead are not worth counting is a further cruelty imposed on the parents, wives and children who have suffered in this war not of their making. As we celebrate victory, our disregard for the vanquished is shameful.