Editorial: An exhibit to think about

There is conflicting information everywhere regarding the Iraq Body Count Exhibit currently on display at Portland State. What’s true is that the exhibit displays over 100,000 total flags representing the deaths of U.S. soldiers and Iraqis during the last five years of war, using red and white flags, respectively.

The Willamette Week, PDX Peace and the Portland Independent Media Center, among others, have all cited incorrect information about the exhibit. They’ve all reported that a white flag stands for five or more Iraqis and a red flag stands for one American–insinuating that American casualties are over-proportionally represented.

Fliers around the exhibit explicitly state that each white flag represents at least five Iraqis, and each red flag represents five U.S. soldiers killed since 2003. The exhibit is proportional in order to help people visualize the 655,000 Iraqi and 3,972 American deaths.

We don’t know where the Body Count Exhibit proprietors got their numbers. We don’t know if the number of Iraqi casualties includes just civilians or soldiers too, and we don’t know if they were killed by Americans, terrorists or in some other way. But we do know that the exhibit has got us thinking about it, about this war and about how unfortunate it is that the flags are here at all.

The point of the Iraq Body Count Exhibit is not to tell you how to think, but to get you thinking. No one seems to know the exact casualty count from this war. But if it is at least five times the number of flags currently standing in the Park Blocks, hasn’t the fighting gone on far too long?