August-----" U.S. Troops in Iraq See Highest Injury Toll Yet"

[billbuckhead]

U.S. Troops in Iraq See Highest Injury Toll Yet
By Karl Vick
Washington Post

Sunday 05 September 2004

BAGHDAD, Sept. 4 -- About 1,100 U.S. soldiers and Marines were wounded in Iraq during August, by far the highest combat injury toll for any month since the war began and an indication of the intensity of battles flaring in urban areas.

U.S. medical commanders say the sharp rise in battlefield injuries reflects more than three weeks of fighting by two Army and one Marine battalion in the southern city of Najaf. At the same time, U.S. units frequently faced combat in a sprawling Shiite Muslim slum in Baghdad and in the Sunni cities of Fallujah, Ramadi and Samarra, all of which remain under the control of insurgents two months after the transfer of political authority.

"They were doing battlefield urban operations in four places at one time," said Lt. Col. Albert Maas, operations officer for the 2nd Medical Brigade, which oversees U.S. combat hospitals in Iraq. "It's like working in downtown Detroit. You're going literally building to building."
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<http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/090604Y.shtml>

[BootinUp]

1. I think it means - "We have them on the run"

thats what I heard. :eyes:

[wtmusic]

2. Memo -- they don't want us there

ya think?

[cliss]

3. Right. We're so enormously popular,

that we're fighting to stay alive. Harsh experience has shown, time and time again, that if you do not have the support of the local population, you will not succeed. VietNam proved that.

The US, with all its sophistication and military hardware, could not fight against small, armed units called guerrillas. They would vanish into the population because that was their harbor. The local population would just stand there with a blank look on their faces, and shake their heads, "we don't know?". We lost that war. We had to admit defeat and go home.

"But this is different!", Rumsfeld would say to me. This is MUCH more important than VietNam ever was. The outcome of our oil-soaked society is at stake. We NEED that oil. So does the rest of Europe, he would continue. So this is a war that we must win, at all costs.

We certainly do try! The outcome will most probably be the same as IndoChina, however, because we are strangers in a strange land. We're the visiting team, and we're bound to lose.

If by some fluke chance we were to succeed in suppressing the population, they will take it out of us in the form of enormous, draining costs which will kill us anyway.

Colin Powell said to Bush, "you take over that country, and it's going to be yours. You'll own it".

[Art_from_Ark]

4. And bu$h said,

"Yee-haw! I git to own mah own country! Talk about yer ownership society!"