Body counts, or more precisely dead-body counts, is a military practice that probably goes back to the beginning of civilization: there had to be some means of recording the results of battles or else the point of the exercise of war was missed. It is not possible to say for certain whether the ancients counted only enemy dead or their own dead or both. A simple fact of military command is to know with what strength it counts. Equally important is the size of the enemy in comparison with its forces upon joining battle. Most battles in history have probably been indecisive (at least at their start), so these tallies were indispensable.

Body-counting and bragging or propaganda often go together, but they are different. In Pharaonic inscriptions but generally in kingly pronouncements in Antiquity the claims of enemy dead were usually just propaganda, nothing to do with the actual results in the field of battle. Propaganda based on enemy kills has gone on through the centuries to modern times in rational Europe. The Swedish king Charles II defeated Peter the Great at Narva (1700) and he bragged that killing Russians was like "shooting geese". The British consolation after winning the Second Afghan war but evacuating Kabul was that the few thousands of their troops routed "one hundred thousand Afghan Ghazis" (1879). America remained in Vietnam as long as it did in part because every day the military gave out inflated body counts of Vietnamese communists. Atrocities on civilians were probably inadvertently included in the press handouts.

The real "inventors" of the body-count practice as both military intelligence and political boasting were the Ancient Greeks. Herodotus described the Persian invasion of Greece (490) as consisting of a million men. The Athenians counted exactly 192 of their own dead after the battle on the beach at Marathon. This made them so proud that 192 is presumed to have been the number of equestrian sculptures on the Parthenon friezes.

Apart from legends, which, remarkably in history-conscious Rome, date as late as the 5th century BCE, Rome did not make much of body-counting. Tallying the enemy dead often implies courage overcoming numerical odds. The ultimate instance of this is probably Horatio's single-handed defense of a bridge to Rome before an invading Etruscan army. In better documented times Romans themselves were not numerical underdogs and their boasting was about their strength. The Phoenicians defeated the Romans in Italy various times and Pyrrhus of Epirus did too. Yet Rome prevailed against both enemies because it had more manpower.

America makes a fetish of body-counting

During the Middle Ages, as at any time in history, individual courage was admired. The Spanish epic hero, El Cid, did not always fight for Christianity, but his bravery was such that it was fictionalized. And Richard the Lionheart was probably more dense than brave. Returning to England from the Crusades, he crossed Austria, whose ruler he had humiliated at Acre, and was kidnapped for ransom. He died because, during the siege of an insignificant fortress in France, he kept prancing on his horse and defying the defenders. An archer took aim and Richard was so big that he couldn't miss. Discounting numerical odds through sheer courage in Medieval times was very significant during the Crusades (11th-12th centuries), when a relative handful of Christians created states and won encounters against a vastly superior if disunited enemy.

Body-counting is a normal tendency among fighting men. It was virtually irresistible when the English defeated the more numerous French in battles at Crécy (1345), Poitiers (1356), and Agincourt (1415) during the Hundred Years war. A battle, or three battles in this case, does not a war make, and the French unquestionably won in the end, but to this day British historians brag of the booty the English armies took home from France at the time.

During the centuries before Napoleon, the Europeans were not particularly given to bragging about body counts or overcoming odds. What mattered were the numbers and the positions of the contending forces, which made the outcomes nearly predictable. There was one case of unmitigated boasting and that was in Prussia about the exploits of Frederick the Great (1740-1786). During the Seven Years war, Frederick at one point was having to fight on three fronts: in one campaign he defeated first the French and then the Austrians, before turning to face the Russians. However, his previous victory over Austria had not been decisive and he was soon facing Russians and Austrians. His dilemma was such that he considered suicide. What saved his neck was that Russian empress Elizabeth died and was succeeded by her nephew Peter III, who had been admiring Frederick and took Russia out of the war.

Part of Napoleon's legend is that he won so many battles against so many enemies. The French could boast that they were fighting against much of Europe and so were victorious by virtue of their bravery and the genius of their military leader. For a time, losses were probably about even or not much different between contenders, so body-counting did not come into the picture, although in the French view of things, when they started revolutionizing Europe, they were initially outnumbered yet still managed to inflict greater losses. At the end of the Napoleonic wars, France had probably suffered more losses than its enemies, certainly many more than Great Britain did.

The British in India always won against greater numbers. When their Indian regiments rebelled in 1857, the British were outnumbered by 9 to 1. When the rebellion ended, the same or a higher proportion held for dead on both sides, including the large number of executions applied by the British. Actually, the British had considerable native support and the disproportion, when the rebellion started, was not really so pronounced. A common mode of execution during and after the rebellion was to strap the victim to the caisson and blow his body away from the cannon mouth. H. Munro, of the British East India company, appears to have been the inventor of this method of capital punishment  to discipline his sepoys before the battle of Baxar (1764).

The government of the USA was not keen on publicizing fatal casualties during the Civil War, because it would have shown that it was taking a beating from the Confederates, which held true until Sherman's march to the sea, when rebel deaths made the unevenness less marked. After that conflict America made a fetish of body-counting, almost to the point where it seemed as if causing death and avoiding death were the ends themselves of war.

This might have been a consequence of America's participation in World War I, a conflict in which the carnage was so vast that body counts made no sense as they escalated into the millions. Even if you won, you lost, and there was no possible way to say that one side was fighting from a situation of numerical inferiority. France alone could have made that claim, but it had Britain on its left flank and Russia on the eastern front, so Germany's population edge over France was not only nullified but far surpassed by French alliances. When the USA entered the war, Germany was in a situation of complete inferiority and its losses grew proportionately. The USA was on the winning side but it could hardly be said that it had won the war except in terms of casualties suffered and casualties produced. By comparison with the other belligerents, America was barely scratched, and that's the way it wanted it to be always.

Body-counting is crucial to Israeli strategy in Palestine

World War II was so destructive that it made it almost impossible to keep losses down, but even so the American deaths count was lower than during the Civil War. The Japanese were ceding islands at the expense of suicidal tactics and Germany had wasted itself in the eastern front. Body counts made not the slightest bit of difference during World War II, because the greatest winner of the land war, the USSR, suffered so many fatal casualties that, on that basis alone, it would have have lost the war before it began to win it.

Body counts became absolutely crucial for the USA during the Korean war, for here was a conflict it had begun losing, then had practically won up to when waves upon waves of Chinese in quilted winter wear and brandishing machine guns crossed the Yalu river border and drove the Americans back. This transpired in less than one year. The rest of the war was stalemate. The USA counted it a military victory because of the numbers of Chinese its troops mowed down. However, the same numbers routine did not work in Vietnam--where the phrase "body count" was probably coined--because there was no war front and people simply began to disbelieve it. No amount of body-counts could prove that America was winning if it was losing control of territory. After Vietnam, the USA was so careful about not taking losses that it seemed to eschew chances of inflicting them. This changed dramatically with 9/11 and the Second Iraqi war.

In Israel/Palestine and Ulster, conflict has always been about body counts. In Ulster, even though the headlines often seemed to imply that the IRA was doing most of the killing, it was the Protestant terrorists that produced more victims, although in the end the Unionists had to give way politically. In Israel/Palestine, the Second Intifada, which began before 9/11, got serious because of suiciders. The ratio of losses was not as lopsided against Palestinians as it usually was. Israel responded by electing, first, and cautiously, Benyamin Netanyahu, and then brazenly, Ariel Sharon. Maybe Netanyahu would have gotten as tough as Sharon, but the latter was the body-count man par excellence. He applied the defensive strategy of protective walls and he ordered that Palestinians be punished. Nowadays for every Israeli killed ten or more Palestinians are going to die. The Israelis call the victims "militants". They usually also throw in a few civilians to persuade the faithful that their body counts of terrorists are generally accurate and fair.

Why the Second Iraqi war was waged was either transparent or it was absurd. Either Bush knew he was lying through his teeth or he really believed what he said, and this is hard for others to believe. Underlying his discredited arguments, there was the basic rage and frustration of 9/11, still unassuaged. Another reason was the safety of Israel. It might have been buried in layers of rhetoric and mainly under all the lies that were told, but it was there.

Iraq has not responded well to American occupation. At the start of the war, the USA applied body counts, like, saying: "See, ma, no hands". By now statistics are not bandied about. The ripostes to terrorist attacks have been even more devastating than in Israel and Iraqis are dying daily by the dozens, most at the hands of their own insurgents but many also from American air raids. Ironically, the USA, who wanted to make the world safer from terrorism, is knee-deep in the proto-typically body-count struggle against an enemy that uses suicide tactics, hits-and-runs, wires car bombs, sets road traps, and so on. What greater love can there be than to have taken part of Israel's burdens on its shoulders? But if the USA is many times larger than Israel, occupied Iraq is like Palestine multiplied one hundred fold.

So then what are body counts for? They have been in the very remote past indispensable military tools. They are the classical basis of bragging rights. But during much of history, they were ignored or meaningless. They made a comeback in the Post-War period as propaganda (victory in defeat or in stalemate) and as a weapon of reprisal. When hopefully it was thought they were becoming obsolete, they have come back into vogue again with a vengeance. In Israel, body count strategies have had some effect. In Iraq, they are not likely too. Ironically, unlike what prevailed in Korea and in Vietnam, the body count that is most significant in Iraq is not that of America's enemies but that of American soldiers.