What a mess. The Iraqi's "insurgents" are getting more effective, not less effective.
It was a mistake to go in... but we've accomplished the mission, SH is gone; no wmd's. It's time to get out and let them build their own government, as they see fit. Set a date. And let them take responsibility; self-determination. It's the "conservative" thing to do.
Nation building doesn't work; whatever we "build" won't last anyway.
Four U.S. GIs Die in Iraq Rocket Attack
28 minutes ago
By JIM KRANE, Associated Press Writer
BAGHDAD - Insurgents struck a U.S. military base north of Baghdad with rockets, killing four soldiers, around dawn on Saturday, a U.S. official said, while an apparent suicide car bomb exploded near a base in Tikrit, killing at least three Iraqis.
Two 57-mm rockets slammed into the base in Taji, at around 5:30 a.m., Air Force Lt. Col. Sam Hudspath said. Taji is a former Iraqi air force base 12 miles north of Baghdad that is now used by the U.S. Army's 1st Cavalry Division.
Further north, the car bomb in Tikrit tore into a row of shops near the main U.S. base in the city. Witnesses said they believed the blast was targeting a convoy of Iraqi officials heading to the mayor's office in the city, hometown of former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein (news - web sites) and a center for anti-U.S. resistance.
Video footage from Associated Press Television News showed three dead bodies in the blackened husk of a car. It was not immediately clear whether the dead were bystanders or attackers.
The blast appeared to be from a suicide attacker who set off a car bomb, said Master Sgt. Robert Powell of the Army's 1st Infantry Division at the Tikrit base. No U.S. soldiers were hurt.
Elsewhere, a Marine died from combat injuries suffered on April 14 while fighting guerrillas in Iraq (news - web sites)'s western Anbar province. The Marines have been besieging the Anbar city of Fallujah since the beginning of the month, but the military has not been specifying if Marine casualties from Anbar are from that campaign.
And an Iraqi woman who works as a U.S. military translator was shot and killed south of Baghdad along with her husband Saturday, as they drove to a U.S. base, a hospital official said. A pair of roadside bombs exploded northeast of Baghdad, injuring three Iraqi police and a 4-year-old girl.
The deaths of the four soldiers in Baghdad and the Marine brought to 106 the number of U.S. troops killed in Iraq since the beginning of April. Since March 2003, 714 service-members have died in this country.
The Pentagon (news - web sites) announced Friday that 595 U.S. soldiers have been wounded in the past two weeks, raising the total number of troops wounded in combat to 3,864 since the start of the conflict.
On Friday, U.S. commanders repeated blunt warnings that the Marine assault on Fallujah could resume, meaning a revival of heavy fighting that has killed hundreds of Iraqis in the city. Marines say guerrillas in the city have not been sincerely abiding by a call to surrender heavy weapons in their arsenals.
Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt suggested Marines could storm the city within days.
"Our patience is not eternal. ... We're talking days," Kimmitt said.
A day earlier, the U.N.'s top envoy for Iraq said the 25 members of Iraq's U.S.-picked Governing Council should be excluded from a planned caretaker government that is supposed to take nominal sovereignty from the U.S.-led occupation on June 30.
While a group of "technocrats" runs the interim government, the council members should spend the next nine months campaigning for elections due by the end of January, said the envoy, Lakhdar Brahimi.
Washington has thrown its backing behind Brahimi's proposal, suggesting the United States is prepared to allow the removal of Iraqis it had put forward to run the country.
Brahimi also said the United Nations (news - web sites) was unlikely to send peacekeepers to Iraq.
Brahimi, who the United States has asked to help select an interim Iraqi government, said the Governing Council should be dissolved as planned on June 30.
"They have said twice, not once, in official documents they signed, that our term will end on the 30th of June," Brahimi said Friday on ABC's "This Week With George Stephanopoulos."
Brahimi said Iraq's politicians should be elected to their posts, not installed.
"People who have political parties and are leaders of their parties should get really to win the election," he said. "And stay out of the interim government."
Instead, Iraq should be governed in the seven-month interim period before January elections by a government of "technocrats" representative of Iraq's ethnic diversity, Brahimi has said.
Brahimi said in a separate interview that it was unlikely that the United Nations will send its "blue berets" or peacekeeping troops to Iraq. In the interview, with Egypt's Middle East News agency, the envoy said U.S.-led multinational forces and Iraqi security forces should be used to stabilize Iraq after the June 30 handover of nominal sovereignty.
Also Friday, the chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff said the war in Iraq is going "reasonably well" but acknowledged the United States faces long-term involvement there. Gen. Richard Myers made the assessment just hours after the Pentagon announced the number of American troops wounded in Iraq soared over the past two weeks.
The top U.S. commander in the Middle East, Army Gen. John Abizaid, suggested in an interview with The New York Times in Qatar on Friday that he was likely to ask for another extension in the current troop levels in Iraq, now at 135,000, and might even ask for more troops beyond that.
Myers also said fighting terrorism is a long-term commitment and said, "Decades is probably not unreasonable."
In South Korea (news - web sites), hundreds of demonstrators rallied on Saturday to protest the government's plan to send 3,000 troops to Iraq to help U.S.-led coalition forces rebuild the war-torn nation.
The deployment, pledged earlier this year for the northern Iraq oil town of Kirkuk, was put on hold amid concerns it would involve combat operations in violation of a parliamentary mandate for peacekeeping.
South Korea is now considering two other, more peaceable towns in the northern Kurdish region of Iraq, Sulaimaniyah and Irbil.
South Korea's contingent would make it the biggest coalition partner after the United States and Britain.
In the restive town of Baqouba on Friday, a roadside bomb blasted an Iraqi police patrol, wounding three officers, witnesses said. Another roadside bomb exploded in the town on Saturday, as a U.S. military convoy passed, injuring a 4-year-old Iraqi girl, said Dr. Hussein Ali Hadi from main city hospital.
Also Friday, the top U.S. administrator in Iraq, L. Paul Bremer, announced that the new Iraqi army would begin recruiting former high-level officers from Saddam Hussein's disbanded military — and he eased a ban on former Baath Party members, allowing thousands of teachers and professors to return to work in schools. |
