Within days of Washington's war on Iraq entering its sixth year, the White House confirmed news reports that the US troop death toll had passed the 4000 mark. Associated Press reported on March 23 that "the grim milestone" came after "a roadside bomb killed four US soldiers in Baghdad".
AP also reported that later that day the city's heavily fortified Green Zone was pounded on and off for five hours by rockets and mortars fired, according to local witnesses, from Sadr City, Baghdad's 2.5-million-strong Shiite slum district.
"It was the most sustained assault in months against the nerve center of the US mission", AP noted.
The 4000th US troop death came only four days after US President George Bush marked the fifth anniversary of the beginning of the war with a March 19 speech at the Pentagon in which he declared that the US military was on track toward to victory.
Referring to his January 2007 decision to "temporarily" boost US troop numbers in Iraq by 30,000 — taking the total size of the US occupation forces to around 160,000 since June — Bush said: "The surge has done more than turn the situation in Iraq around — it has opened the door to a major strategic victory in the broader War on Terror."
In addition to the rising US death toll, at least 29,450 US military personnel have been seriously wounded in the war. Ninety-seventy per cent of US war casualties have occurred since Bush announced in May 2003 that major combat operations had ended. Last year was the deadliest so far for US troops, with 901 dying.
Iraqi deaths
The US casualty numbers are dwarfed by the number of Iraqis killed since the US-led invasion five years ago. A study conducted by Baltimore's John Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and the college of medicine at Baghdad's Mustansiriya University found that between March 2003 and June 2007 there had been almost a million Iraq war casualties.
In a report on the study, published in the October 2006 British Lancet medical journal, its authors estimated that up to 942,636 "Iraqis have died above what would have been expected on the basis of the pre-invasion crude mortality rate", and that up to 793,663 of these deaths "were due to violence", principally bullet wounds.
An Iraqi health ministry survey conducted in January 2006 estimated that between 104,000 and 223,000 Iraqis had died violently since the 2003 invasion. The results were published in the January 2008 New England Journal of Medicine, along with an editorial critical of the survey's methodology.
In a January 11 media release, Les Roberts, one of the authors of the Lancet study, noted that the "NEJM article found a doubling of mortality after the invasion, we found a 2.4-fold increase ... The big difference is that we found almost all the increase from violence, they found one-third the increase from violence ...
"There are reasons to suspect that the NEJM data had an under-reporting of violent deaths. They roughly found a steady rate of violence from 2003 to 2006. Baghdad morgue data, Najaf burial data, Pentagon attack data, and our data all show a dramatic increase over 2005 and 2006 ... It is [also] likely that people would be unwilling to admit violent deaths to the study workers who were government employees."
Five years ago, Bush justified the invasion of Iraq as part of the post-9/11 "War on Terror", claiming — without any evidence — that the secular Baath Party government of oil-rich Iraq had "ties" to Saudi Arabian Islamist millionaire Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda terrorist network. In October 2002, for example, Bush claimed that "Iraq has trained al Qaeda members in bomb-making and poisons and deadly gases".
Earlier this month however, news agencies reported that the first and only study by the US miliary of alleged ties between Iraq's Baathist government and al Qaeda showed "no direct operational link" between the two.
On March 20, the US Joint Forces Command posted on its website a 94-page version of the USJFCOM-sponsored study, entitled The Iraqi Perspectives Project — Saddam and Terrorism: Emerging Insights from Captured Iraqi Documents. The USJFCOM website reported that the "study's authors completed the report after screening more than 600,000 captured documents including several hundred hours of audio and video files archived by US Department of Defense".
The study authors' state that they "found no 'smoking gun' (i.e., direct connection) between Saddam's Iraq and al Qaida", though the declassified version of their report tries to make such a connection. Thus it declares that Saddam Hussein's government "supported" groups that "generally shared al Qaeda's stated goals and objectives". No details are given, other than a footnote stating: "The nature of al Qaeda and its associated movements makes establishing firm organizational connections difficult."
Continuing violence
In his March 19 speech, Bush also declared: "Because of the troop surge, the level of violence is significantly down ... Attacks on American forces are down."
The March 24 New York Times reported that, "Recent statistics compiled by the Pentagon suggest that after dropping significantly last fall, the number of daily attacks remained static from November through January, the last month for which official figures were available". Reuters reported on March 24 that "there has been an increase in attacks since January".
The same day's Washington Post reported that the "US military showcases Fallujah as a model city where US policies are finally paying off and is spending hundreds of millions of dollars in the region to promote the rule of law and a variety of nation-building efforts.
"But the security that has been achieved here is fragile, the result of harsh tactics recalling the rule of Saddam Hussein, who was overthrown five years ago. Even as they work alongside US forces, [Fallujah police officers] admit they have beaten and tortured suspects to force confessions and exact revenge.
"In the city's overcrowded, Iraqi-run jail, located inside a compound that also houses a US military base and US police advisers, detainees were beaten with iron rods, according to the current warden. Many were held for months with no clear evidence or due process. They were deprived of food, medical care and electricity and lived in utter squalor, said detainees, Iraqi police and US military officers, who began to address the problems three weeks ago. Last summer, the warden said, several detainees died of heatstroke."
Fallujah police chief Colonel Faisal Ismail al Zobaie told the Post that his officers abused detainees because "they don't confess. They say: 'I am innocent. I haven't done anything'."
The Post concluded its report by noting that "the US military today depends on men such as Zobaie to help bring about the order and security in Iraq that could eventually lead to the end of the American occupation. 'I have realized that Americans love the strong guy', Zobaie said."