Last month, total US military casualties in Iraq since the March 2003 invasion exceeded 50,000 dead and wounded. By January 28, 3071 US soldiers had died in Iraq and at least 47,657 had been wounded, according to Pentagon figures.
The Pentagon, however, claims that total US war casualties in Iraq are half the 50,000 figure, because it only classifies as combat casualties those who have been killed or wounded as a direct result of "enemy action".
Stephen Robinson, a Washington-based veterans advocate and former US Army officer, told the January 28 Cleveland Plain Dealer that the Pentagon purposely misleads the public with its counting methods. He gave the paper an example of the Pentagon not counting injuries that result from a crash caused when there is an attack by Iraqis on another vehicle in a US convoy. The Pentagon classifies the injuries as resulting from a vehicle accident and doesn't add them to the combat toll.
"It might be semantics to the Department of Defence, but it masks the full extent of the consequences of the war and who's getting hurt", Robinson, Veterans for America's director of government relations, told the Plain Dealer.
Harvard University researcher Linda Bilmes, who with Nobel economics laureate Joseph Stiglitz has done research on the cost of the Iraq war, told the Plain Dealer the 47,000-wounded figure is the most accurate.
In a guest column in the January 5 Los Angeles Times, Bilmes observed that "for every [US] fatality in Iraq, there are 16 [US] injuries. That's an unprecedented casualty level. In the Vietnam and Korean wars, by contrast, there were fewer than three people wounded for each fatality. In World Wars I and II, there were less than two ...
"In one sense, this reflects positive change: Better medical care and stronger body armor are enabling many more soldiers to survive injuries that might have led, in earlier generations, to death. But like so much else about this war, the Bush administration failed to foresee what it would mean, failed to plan for the growing tide of veterans who would be in urgent need of medical and disability care. The result is that as the Iraq war approaches its fourth anniversary, the Department of Veterans Affairs [VA] is buckling under a growing volume of disability claims and rising demand for medical attention.
"So far, more than 200,000 veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan have been treated at VA medical facilities — three times what the VA projected, according to a Government Accountability Office analysis."
According to the VA's figures, 32% of all US veterans of the Iraq war and the war in Afghanistan — 205,097 of the 631,174 troops who had returned and been discharged as of November — had sought medical care from the department.
Bilmes claimed that the Veterans Benefits Administration has a "backlog of 400,000 pending claims". "Veterans must wait from six months to two years to begin receiving the money that is due to them while the agency plods through paperwork. The staff eventually helps veterans secure 88% of the benefits they ask for — but in the interim, thousands of veterans with disabilities are left to fend for themselves."