Fig. 1. Number of soldiers (as of April, 2007) wounded in the course of Iraq War as reported by the U.S. Department of Defense and as estimated on the basis of Glaser's (2007) medical report..

	Chapter I	Tragedy at Mayerling
	Chapter II	Death of a Princess
	Chapter III	Malediction
	Chapter IV	The First Casualty of War
	Chapter V	Credibility of Foreign Informants
	Chapter VI	Confabulations of Nurse Nayirah
	Chapter VII	Jumana Hanna and Sara Solovitch
	Chapter VIII	Origins of the First World War
	Chapter IX	Ritual Slaughter
	Chapter X	Search for Implausible Narratives

 

The first casualty of war Official government statistics are often unreliable, biased, or outright fraudulent. However, sometimes it is possible to uncover the degree to which they are falsified. Consider the following facts. As of April 10, 2007, the official number of reported casualties in the Iraq war was 3,288 and the reported number of the American wounded soldiers was 24,476. About the same time, Ronald Glaser, M.D., in a signed article in the Washington Post (Glaser, 2007) reported that the ratio of wounded to killed soldiers in the Iraq is 16 to 1. Glaser's article is an objective report on medical matters, unlikely to be biased. According to this ratio, the number of wounded soldiers in the course of the Iraq war would be about 52,600 and not 24,467, as reported by the U.S. Department of Defense. The magnitude of this discrepancy is visualized in Figure 1.

In 1917, Senator Hiram Johnson observed (Knightley, 1975) that

The first casualty when war comes is truth

this statement being true today as ever.

References

Glaser, R. (2007) A shock wave of brain injuries. Washington Post, April 8.

Knightley, P. (1975) The first casualty. New York: Harcourt Brace.