Via Foreign Policy:
While a U.S. diplomatic official bragged Thursday that the U.S.-led coalition had killed 6,000 Islamic State fighters in Iraq and Syria, the Pentagon was quick to quash the statistic, not necessarily because it was wrong, but because the military wants to avoid anything reminiscent of the famously inflated “body counts” used during Vietnam.
The back-and-forth is the latest evidence of an administration that is not on the same page with its talking points about the Islamic State. That matters as the White House tries to maintain public and congressional support for an expanding military campaign that has so far failed to push the group out of the broad expanses of territory it holds in Syria and Iraq.
The Obama administration’s line about its strategy to defeat the Islamic State has been marked by confusion and conflicting messages since the U.S. first got involved in the fight this summer. The group either posed a threat to the U.S. scarier than al Qaeda did before 9/11 or it was a regional danger that could morph into something more powerful if not kept in check. The United States was going to chase the group “to the gates of hell,” or “shrink” the group until it became a “manageable problem.”
The latest episode of administration officials talking past each other came Thursday when U.S. Ambassador to Iraq Stuart Jones tried to push back against criticism that the U.S. and its partners weren’t doing enough to fight the Islamic State by telling the Al Arabiya News Channel that the airstrikes have killed more than 6,000 Islamic State fighters in Syria and Iraq and eliminated significant numbers of its high-ranking commanders.
But at the Pentagon, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel told reporters that he had not seen that number verified anywhere — and that he opposed the very idea of tallying up the dead.
Hagel, who was an an Army squad leader in Vietnam, said that body counts were an unreliable metric of progress. “I was in a war where there were body counts every day and we lost that war,” he said.