�Roughly� 500,000 children in the early 1990s? �About� a million people killed by the invasion and its aftermath? �A few million� more lives maimed, displaced, wrecked (as much by grief and despair as by physical mutilation)? Such statistics are terribly abstract, obscenely abstract: an adding-machine tabulates an endless list of corpses into an abstract figure to be entered in the chronicle of �collateral damage,� �civilian casualties,��or a �body count.�