[NYTr] 2007 US Occupn Troop Deaths So Far AlLREADY Surpass 2006

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

excerpts from Juan Cole's Informed Comment blog - Oct 24, 2007


2007 US Occupn Troop Deaths So Far Already Surpass 2006

An Iraqi commission found Blackwater security guards guilty of killing
17 Iraqis in cold blood and the Iraqi government is determined to see
the company expelled from the country and wants substantial reparations
paid to the families of the victims.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/worldlatest/story/0,,-7022006,00.html

Fred Kaplan on how the new air strike policy of dealing with Iraqi
guerrillas is bad counter-insurgency and guaranteed to alienate the
Iraqi population further from the US. See also my comments of yesterday.
http://www.slate.com/id/2176464/

John Judis on the way Bush's Iraq War is of a piece with the history of
imperialism.
http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?article=bushs_neoimperialist_war

[...]

At Salon.com, my column on the collapse of Bush's Middle East police,
with the troubles on the Turkish/Iraq border and the huge bomb that
greeted Benazir Bhutto in Pakistan.
http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2007/10/24/kurds/

Edward Luce of FT argues that Iraq has faded as a campaign issue in the
08 presidential election. He attributes this lower profile for the
issue to a drop in US military deaths in Iraq and to the rise of Iran
as an issue instead.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21440765/

I may have been the first to point to the new salience of Iran to the
race, in my Salon column last week, so I do not disagree with that
assertion.
http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2007/10/17/iran/index.html

But I think it is way too early to write Iraq off as an issue. In fact,
given the current crisis at the northern border with Turkey, it is a
little bit bizarre to suggest that things have all calmed down, either
over there or domestically.

First of all, the assertion that US troop deaths have fallen is
extremely misleading. In fact, It is only late October and already more
US troops were killed in Iraq in 2007 than in all of 2006. Indeed, 2007
will almost certainly hold the record for the year of the most US
military deaths since the war began.

According to the Iraq Casualties Site, these are the yearly numbers of
death of US military personnel in Iraq:

Year       US Deaths
2003       486
2004       849
2005       846
2006       822
2007       832

http://icasualties.org/oif/

It is true that October is on track to be the least deadly for US
troops since March of 2006.

It is, however, not clear why exactly US troop deaths have fallen so
much in October. It is possible that they are being given few military
missions and spending more time on base.

Indeed, the sort of ground missions that might involve hand to hand
fighting and high US casualties may have been replaced by air strikes
against suspected insurgent targets. US air strikes on Iraq are up by a
factor of four in 2007 over 2006, according to [USA Today]. The US
launched 1,140 bombing missions in 2007 through the end of September,
as opposed to 229 in all of 2006. The US has flown as many as 70 such
air missions a day this October, more than at any time since the
November, 2004, assault on the Sunni Arab city of Fallujah.
http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/iraq/2007-10-21-airstrikes_N.htm


Obviously, for an Occupation military to bomb a densely-populated city
that it already largely controls is a violation of human rights law.
The United Nations Assistance Mission in Iraq has just condemned the US
for using this tactic, which inevitably kills children, women and other
non-combatants. 
http://onlinejournal.com/artman/publish/article_2560.shtml

You can't drop a bomb on an urban apartment building
without killing lots of people, not only inside the building but also
all around it. The bomb turns bits of the building into deadly
projectiles. I am told that the US Air Force takes no responsibility
for these aerial strikes when they are called in by army troops on the
ground, and makes no assessment as to whether proportional force was
deployed or excessive civilian casualties were incurred. So you have a
convoy of soldiers in humvees driving through deeply hostile Sadr City,
and someone starts sniping at them from a building. Obviously, running
into the building is dangerous; it could be booby-trapped, or snipers
could have set up there. I wouldn't want to do it. So the tendency
would obviously be to take out the snipers by taking out the building
they are using. That makes military sense. It doesn't make sense in the
international law of occupations.

The US military spokesmen are always going on about precision strikes
and reducing civilian casualties. I know they are sincere in thinking
they can do that, but they just aren't dealing with a simple reality.
They are bombing apartment buildings in densely populated cities!

The US military, then, may be artificially keeping US military deaths
down this fall by resorting to many more aerial bombings. These
bombings have repeatedly drawn forth powerful condemnations from the
elected Iraqi political authorities and are unlikely to be viable much
longer.

Evidence that US troops are being extremely careful also comes from the
new policy on checkpoints. All vehicles are going to be stopped from
now on except those of a high-ranking Iraqi politician such as the prime minister. One reader observed to me in an email of this story, that apparently the US in Iraq has fallen on such hard times that it can't trust anyone below the rank of prime minister.
http://blogs.abcnews.com/theblotter/2007/10/us-al-qaeda-usi.html

The use of curfews and bans on vehicle traffic also seems to have
expanded. The large northern city of Mosul (pop. 1.5 million) was put
under curfew after bombings in late September. Several neighborhoods of
Diwaniya are under curfew after clashes between the Mahdi Army and
local police.
http://www.hindustantimes.com/StoryPage/StoryPage.aspx?id=cbead471-a832-4802-97b7-f64e4807d97a&&Headline=Bombings+kill+over+50+across+Iraq

The entire city of Falluja appears to continue to labor under a ban on
the operation of private vehicles (i.e. you cannot drive your car
there). This policy has produced 80% unemployment. Basically keeping an
entire city under lockdown has allowed the drawdown of US Marines from
the city, with only 250 left. But it is crazy to think that this policy
can be kept in place forever, and when the cars start circulating
again, won't there be trouble?
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/chi-fallujah_bdoct14,1,3431276.story

That US reporters put such a positive spin on stories like the vast
increase in aerial bombardment or the lockdown in Falluja just boggles
my mind. Have they all drunk the Kool-Aid?