I think that this is the only way the government can gain support for their actions. I think that they see how only the deaths of U.S. troops are reported in the news and not the other side. The public is not seeing how many enemy troops are killed for every U.S. soldier’s death. It is a way of keeping score, they were not getting a big enough reponse when they reported taking over an enemy stronghold. It has already been proven that public responds more to bad news. How much attention will they get if they publicized the fact that 4.3 million Iraqi kids are enrolled in school?

I don't know if this idea is going to do any good? It sounds like there is no way of getting an accurate number. Also like the vietnam war those numbers could be intentionally raised in order to boost morale.
I also wonder what we can do with number after we have it. Is it really a good gage if we don't know how many insurgents we have to kill before we can leave? It might be good to compare to U.S death rates that would give a good estimate of whether we're putting too much effort into something that isn't worth while.

I think that this could have a good effect on what war is actually like. Some people have the image that we can go over there and just clean house and not lose very many people. It gives a reality check for the people who do not know how serious war actually is. This also might make the people in charge of us going to war to consider what we will actually lose and gain by comparing the actual losses from past experiences of similar combats. Combats meaning countries, terrains, warfare pretty much.

This kind of relates to one of the previous discussion of how the government does not tell the public everything. In this case, I think it is in the best interest for everybody that the death toll be kept unknown to the public. I think that getting the death toll as accurate as possible will only cause more problems and this is a stretch, but it could open up other questions. For example, it could bring up suspicion and more "conspiracies" and the government could tell us more information that we do not need to know and that would cause even less discord in this nation.

Releasing death tolls would help the American public understand the seriousness of what goes on over in Iraq. The timing however is up to them. In some ways waiting would be better and in other cases people might need to know the numbers now. But the tally of the dead should not be the only measure of what happens over there. What about the number of lives that are SAVED everyday? Is there a tally of that? Or how much passion the soldiers over in Iraq have to serve our country?

Releasing the death toll i believe to be a influncing factor on the American public. The lack of complete facts in such tolls, such as the death of ciziliens,woman, and children. The death toll could also be ninipulatd to make it seem like an army was winning, even if they are losing or suvering masive loses. The public only nows what is told to them, and if the information fed to the public is fack, wrong, or minipulated, that is what the public sees. The death toll also brings war, death, and realism closer to home. With tolls of soldiers on both sides dyeing it greates a cense of war close to home.

Yeah this is a good idea because it is a form of measurement to help US citizens realize the tyrany that happens due to war in foreign countries. I'm not sure this is to show progress, and I don't know how you can say this is a "war with unclear goals."

I do not see a point in releasing a body count for the war in iraq. Some have argued that it is a way to keep score, but i do not belive it to be so. The article points out that there is no way to have a completely accurate body count of the enemy, and a lot of estimating is being done. I also do not see what this tally proves since the military has no idea of how many enemy troops that there actually are.