"What you see is the U.S. deeply involved in this fight against an insurrection and increasingly trying to bring order to a low-level civil war," Anthony H. Cordesman, an analyst for the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said by telephone in Washington. "There's no way you can do that with 140,000 troops in a country of 27 million without having casualties." He added: "This pace of casualties is likely to go on until we can change or find a new approach."
With 111 fatalities, according to iCasualties.org, December was not only the deadliest month of 2006 for U.S. troops, but the deadliest in two years. The military death toll, admitted to be at least 3000 dead, in Iraq now exceeds the number of people killed in the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, which Bush has often cited as justification for the war.
A Pentagon report in December gave a grim assessment of the war, acknowledging that violence soared to its highest level this fall, with anti-U.S. fighters achieving "strategic success" by unleashing a spiral of sectarian killings by Sunni Arab and Shiite Muslim death squads. According to the report, the violence had reached record highs, with 959 attacks per week.
These Republicans just can't admit that they goofed.
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