Whatever actually happened in the ambush at Samarra, the U.S. military’s newfound love for enemy body counts should be disturbing to everyone, for or against the Iraq war.

“We’ve been killing and capturing bushels of these guys, but no one was talking about it,” one senior military officer told a Los Angeles Times reporter. “For a while there it was beginning to look like only Americans were being killed.”

An obsession with what things “look like” is beginning to opress all facets of the Iraq occupation. Touting enemy-kills in a war defined by the asymmetric nature of the opposing forces is beyond useless. And given the difficulty of differentiating between the warriors and the noncombatants, the numbers will be grossly overinflated and tragically overlook the real impact on Iraqi civilians of the occupation.

Here are some figures that do matter in evaluating the success of the occupation:

• Is the number of daily attacks going up or down?
• Is the unemployment rate going down?
• Is the number of well trained Iraqi police going up?
• Is the number of U.S. troops going down?

U.S. forces have been put in a very tough position. Do we really want “Kill as many as you can” to be publicly defined as part of their mission in Iraq? It’s bad for morale, it’s bad for the occupation, it’s bad for average, innocent Iraqis.

(Also posted to Stand Down.)