Tally of the fallen connects us to this war

It has been a while since I visited icasualties.org, an independent, apparently reliable Web site that keeps track of the number of dead and wounded in the Iraq war.

Run by people with other day jobs, icasualties.org is cited regularly by mainstream media, as it was last month in reports U.S. military deaths were at their lowest since March 2006 (36 reported in October).

It's fascinating that one guy's interest and his home server in Georgia grew to become a reliable source of information for the likes of The New York Times and The Associated Press. But more interesting is that icasualties.org is considered a lefty endeavor.

Visually unappealing, the site is a compendium of statistics: A few ads appear at the bottom, a list of news stories at the right, and colorful interactive maps a few clicks in cut the monotony. Otherwise icasualties.org carries table after table of data about the Iraq war wounded and dead — journalists, contractors, coalition forces, guesses at an Iraqi death toll, and, of course, U.S. soldiers.

You can look up a soldier by name, hometown, age, sex, rank and division of the military, location of death, cause of death, deaths by week, month and year. Updated daily, the site relies on news reports and reports from the Department of Defense.

The depth and breadth of information are impressive but the number of names in aggregate is stunning. As I scroll through the lists, random names become focal points and I wonder about the person, the platoon, the family and the finality.

It stirs emotion, but icasualties.org is unadorned information. How can information without spin be considered a lefty endeavor?

Writing in The Weekly Standard last week, Dean Barnett says "icasualties.org is run by a bunch of lefties who have dedicated themselves to aggregating all the bad news out of Iraq over the past few years." His lament, a common one, is that mainstream media ("sometimes ... in lockstep with icasualties.org") focus on death, not successes, in the war.

But remember Gen. David Petraeus' September report to Congress? His testimony — slow but measurable successes are under way in this difficult war — was top of the hour and above the fold for days before, during and after his report to Congress.

Still, the mainstream media are condemned for not reporting successes, and maybe rightly so. A story about bombing victims is easier to explain and requires less space and airtime than an article about military movements and political advances in a part of the world so foreign to many of us.

Those editorial choices stem from how we citizens read or listen to the news. We connect with stories about people, and people on both sides of this war are going through hell: the soldiers; the parents-turned-investigators trying to piece together the circumstances of their kid's death; the families back home figuring how to act when their loved one returns from the first, second or third tour of duty.

I have a friend who saves segments of the Military Channel for me to watch. He says it's because I'm a journalist who will appreciate the dispatches from Iraq, dispatches from warriors on the front lines of a war.

I think he shares them because he believes that people like me — who grew up in protected suburbs and formed our political awareness in the post-Vietnam era, who are educated, who are at least moderate if not liberal and never even smelled the possibility of joining the armed forces — need to think more deeply about what it's like to be on the front lines: to appreciate; to empathize; to cross the divide and try to understand why someone joins the military and maybe hopes to make a career of it.

All of those stories convince me that counting the war dead is not a politically liberal endeavor. The names connect us to the war and to our political responsibility.

In fact, newspapers should do far more than run an occasional story or boilerplate paragraph in other stories about the number of dead in Iraq. They should run a daily tally — a stand-alone box that lists the number of wounded and dead for the day, week, month and year. The trend lines will tell the story of success or the lack thereof.

Information. That's all it is — information.