Kill Rate

Lee at Monkeyswithtypewriter quotes a lengthy passage from Gwynne Dyer on the Gaza conflict a few days ago. Dyer is talking about the poor outcomes of the conflict and postulates at one point that Israel may have been enticed by the prospect of a high 70:1 “kill” ratio. Military commanders seem quite (understandably) enthused by the idea of high kill ratios. From a military perspective it is good that as many people on the enemy side die as possible and as few of your soldiers die as possible.

The media typically absorbs this attitude. You can see it in their reporting – like some sort of bizarre scorecard. 1300 Palestinians dead. 13 Israelis. Israel has killed more Palestinians, therefore they are winning. Israel has killed more Palestinians, therefore they are the aggressors/bullies. Israel has killed more Palestinians, therefore they are Nazis.

Somehow numbers mean one thing to one person and quite the opposite to another. A 100:1 kill rate is a success story to an Israeli general. It is a disaster to a Gazan. A 100:1 kill rate denotes a dangerous military force to be reckoned with to Israel’s neighbours. It signifies a “disproportionate” response to the world’s media. 

And yet the numbers are truly meaningless.

Was the destruction of the twin towers – in which 3500 died – somehow less horrible than the Boxing Day Tsunami in which 150,000 Indonesians died? Was the death of the Kahui twins any worse than the death of Nia Glassie because there were two of them?  Is Robert Mugabe’s murder of 2,500 of his fellow Zimbabwean through Cholera somehow more or less newsworthy than the death of 1313 people in Gaza? Yet Zimbabwe has been mentioned only a tenth as often as Gaza over the past few weeks. How about the 10,000 civilians that have died in Somalia over the past two years? Were they less important than the 29 aid workers who have been killed there (because that’s what the article is about).

And if you want front page stuff, try Congo at a round 5 million dead so far.

You see, numbers are nonsense. We pretend to attach significance to numbers, but, in reality, we only attached significance to things of media interest.  The conflict in Sri Lanka is far worse than anything happening between Gaza and Israel, yet we remained fixed on Israel because that is where the media is focussed. With the ceasefire and Obama’s inauguration, you can feel the focus has moved. Only two articles on Gaza in the paper today. Tomorrow there will be one; Monday, probably nothing. And yet the numbers have not changed at all.

Numbers are nonsense.

There IS a number that doctors listen for in a war. It is a number of far more significance than the number of dead. It is the number of wounded. The number of wounded tells you how many medical supplies you will need. The number of wounded multiplied by ten gives a rough approximation of the numbers in need of temporary food and shelter. This is the number the humanitarians use when they come to repair the damaged caused by war.

In Gaza, that number is 4,336.

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