Deaths of American troops in Iraq passed 100 for the month of April yesterday:
BAGHDAD (AP) — Five U.S. military personnel were killed over the weekend in Iraq, including three by a roadside bomb in Baghdad, the military said Monday, pushing the American death toll past 100 in the deadliest month so far this year.
Four Army soldiers died in eastern Baghdad, a predominantly Shiite Muslim area where U.S. and Iraqi forces have stepped up operations in the security crackdown that began Feb. 14. A Marine was killed in Anbar province, a Sunni Arab insurgent stronghold west of the capital. […]
The U.S. weekend deaths raised to at least 104 the number of American troops killed in Iraq so far in April, making it the deadliest month since December, when 112 died. At least 3,351 personnel have died since the war started, according to the AP count.
April has been the deadliest month for British forces in Iraq since the first month of the war. The 11 British soldiers killed this month is surpassed only by the 27 deaths in March 2003, reflecting increasing violence in southern Iraq where they are based, particularly among Shiite groups vying for influence as Britain prepares to reduce its force.
God knows how many Iraqis have died. No one in the Pentagon or the Bush administration ever seems willing to give an honest account of those deaths, but I’m sure the rise in dead Americans is matched by an equal increase proportionately among dead Iraqis.
Meanwhile, we now learn that the surge in additional American troops will last much longer than we were originally told back when Bush announced his new strategy for victory in Iraq.
In interviews over the past week, the officials made clear that the White House is now gradually scaling back its expectations for the government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. The timelines they are now discussing suggest the White House may maintain the increased numbers of U.S. troops in Iraq well into next year.
That prospect would entail a dramatically longer commitment of frontline troops, patrolling the most dangerous neighborhoods of Baghdad, than the one envisioned in legislation that passed the House and Senate this week….
Unless and until Bush and Cheney are impeached, we are in Iraq through January, 2009, and depending on who is elected President next year, perhaps much longer than that. The longer we stay, the worse the consequences will be for the troops, for our economy, for our national security interests around the world and for what’s left of our collective soul. That is Bush’s legacy: death, failure, wasted lives, wasted dreams and the loss of any moral integrity we once had as a nation. And it’s a legacy that will only get worse, and cost us ever more deeply in the future, each day this war continues.
