In the nineties, the stomach for wartime casualties was evaluated by what came to be called the “Dover Test” — an allusion to Dover Air Force Base in Delaware, where the flag-draped coffins of American service members killed overseas are unloaded. Anticipating public squeamishness, President George H.W. Bush banned news cameras at Dover in 1991, during the Gulf War. In 2003, on the eve of the next Bush’s invasion of Iraq, a Pentagon internal directive made similarly clear that there would be “no arrival ceremonies for, or media coverage of, deceased military personnel” at either Dover or Ramstein Air Base in Germany. By this time, the federal government had forsworn wartime tallies of foreign combatant and civilian casualties. “You know we don’t do body counts,” General Tommy Franks, who oversaw the invasion of Iraq, curtly reminded reporters at Bagram Air Base in 2002. In 2006, President Bush affirmed that his administration had “made a conscious effort not to be a body-count team,” even when it cost him the opportunity to make proud proclamations about American military advancements. “We don’t get to say that — a thousand of the enemy killed, or whatever the number was,” he said. “It’s happening; you just don’t know it.” But, amid the Iraq War’s raging violence, which continued for years after Bush delivered his famous “Mission Accomplished” speech, the president couldn’t always avoid direct questions about the war’s price in Iraqi lives. The U.S. government’s reluctance to publicly issue civilian death tolls for a conflict as politicized as the one in Iraq left a void that was bound to be filled by a cadre of entrepreneurial auditors, generating conflicting estimates that differed by nearly a million deaths — numbers that, alongside their corresponding debates over how deaths in Iraq should be counted, still have not been reconciled.
At an October 2006 press conference, CNN reporter Suzanne Malveaux asked Bush about a new study of post-invasion Iraqi mortality published in the British medical journal The Lancet, which estimated that 654,965 people had died as a consequence of the conflict — 601,027 of them violently. The new number was “twenty times the figure that you cited in December,” Malveaux pointed out to Bush, who a year earlier had determined that the number of Iraqi civilians killed was really “thirty thousand, more or less.” She asked, “Do you care to amend or update your figure?” Bush replied, “Six hundred thousand, or whatever they guessed at, is just, it’s not credible.” The researchers’ methodology, he added, was “pretty well discredited.” Shrugging off the numbers as unscientific was a convenient way to ignore the possibility that Operation Iraqi Freedom might have achieved what was, as the study concluded, “the deadliest international conflict of the 21st century.”