The BBC story on “Suicide Bombs Cause Iraq Carnage” is remarkable, not merely for not identifying the bombers as “insurgents” or “terrorists,” but for the chart above, which aggregates into the “Iraqi death toll” the following categories: “Iraqi civilian, police, military and insurgent death tolls.” The other list is “U.S. and other foreign forces killed by enemy fire.” I doubt that the second category includes the foreign jihadis who have been killed in Iraq, but that’s not an especially huge number. (They do make up virtually all, if not the entirety, of the suicide bombers, however.) More importantly, what sense does it make to lump together the police officers, soldiers, and civilians killed by terrorists and the terrorists themselves into one list? It’s rather like two lists of the dead from World War II: “European civilian, police, military, and Nazi/Fascist death-squad tolls” and “U.S. and other foreign forces killed by enemy fire.” Regardless of what you think about U.S. or other non-European involvement in the European theater in WWII, surely putting the civilian victims of the Nazis and the Nazis themselves on the same list as “European death tolls” would be overlooking an important distinction.
P.S.Note that my opening sentence is somewhat garbled. It should have read:
“The BBC story on ‘Suicide Bombs Cause Iraq Carnage’is remarkable, not merely for failing to identify the ‘insurgents’ as ‘terrorists,’ but for the chart above, which aggregates into the ‘Iraqi death toll’ the following categories: ‘Iraqi civilian, police, military and insurgent death tolls.'”