Sandie Seward
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Death Toll In Iraq.The US military death toll in Iraq has neared 2,500, moving like a shadow behind President George W. Bush's efforts to gain momentum from last week's burst of good news from the war-torn country.
The Pentagon put the death toll as of Wednesday at 2,499 US service members, of whom 1,971 were killed in action.
"Each and every loss is felt hard by our nation, by the units from which those individuals come, and certainly mostly by their families," said Brigadier General
Carter Ham, deputy director of the Joint Staff for regional operations.
"Rather than focus on an aggregate number, I think it is more important for us to remember that there are individuals in that aggregate number and those individuals are those to whom we should feel very, very grateful," he said Thursday.
But the steady rise in US military deaths and the impact of individual deaths on communities around the country has contributed to an erosion in public support for the war in the United States, analysts say.
A USA Today/Gallup poll last week found that 53 percent of Americans believe things are going badly in Iraq, up from 38 percent in March. Fifty one percent believe Washington made a mistake in sending troops into Iraq, against 46 percent who said it had not.
"At one broad level, the death toll has clearly influenced the basic way we see the war," said Michael O'Hanlon, a military expert at the Brookings Institution, a Washington think tank.
"It's first and foremost why Americans don't think as positively about this war as they once did. In that sense it's critical," he said.
"In another sense it's not what is going to dictate future policy. What's going to dictate future policy of the war is going to be if there is any sign of progress."
The US administration got a rare break on that score over the past week with the killing of the Al-Qaeda leader in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zaraqwi, and the end of a paralyzing, months-long struggle to form a new Iraqi government.
Bush sought to capitalize on those gains with a surprise trip to Baghdad this week, while making it clear to Americans at home that an open-ended US military involvement remains crucial to success in Iraq.
US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who has complained that the long delay in forming a new government had cost US lives, said discussions will be held with Iraq's new leaders on the pace of a possible drawdown of US forces.
"The conditions on the ground will determine it," he told reporters Tuesday, noting that US commanders would bring in more troops if they were needed, just as they did while Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki was forming his new cabinet.
General George Casey, the top US commander in Iraq, was to have made recommendations on future US force levels by June 21 but Ham said that has been delayed.
Pentagon officials said there were 127,000 troops in Iraq on Wednesday, a dip in force levels that they attributed to the ebb and flows of troop rotations, not a deliberate decline.
The US military, meanwhile, has reported no let up in the danger to US forces from insurgent and sectarian violence. The violence has worsened this year despite the expansion of Iraqi security forces, widely viewed as the US ticket out of Iraq.
Ham said attacks with improvised explosive devices, the number one killer of US troops, are up even though some 45 percent are detected and stopped before they explode.
The daily toll of US combat deaths has nevertheless receded as an issue since last summer, when Cindy Sheehan, the mother of a soldier who was killed in Vietnam, galvanized opposition to the war with a vigil outside Bush's Texas ranch.
"People are not adjusting their thinking about Iraq too much from week to week or month to month," said O'Hanlon.
"It's already been accepted that this has been a bloody, messy war with a much more uncertain situation than we had hoped, and much greater loss of life than we had hoped or expect," he said.
"So the death toll is a huge problem at one level. On another level Americans are not showing a fundamental lack of resolve."
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Ken R
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In its simplest form, no thought appears to have been given as to what to do once Saddam was un-seated  In military planning terms, this was unforgivable, I rather think that the militarty were backed into a corner by the government, who wanted action, and action now !
As well as friends in low places, I also happen to have friends in high places in the military and the general concensus amongst them is that they are now fighting a defensive action to minimise losses. The difficult part of this is that no one is prepared to tell them how long they have to do this for and without a timeline, planning is virtually done on a day to day basis 
No one trusts the government anymore, intelligence is "doctored" to suit the media and vital info is often late in geting to where it is needed, if, in fact, it gets there at all !!
We can only hope that this debacle is brought to as swift an end as possible and with the minimum casualties.
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Sandie Seward
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I can certainly agree about nobody trusting the government anymore, Ken. Personally, I wouldn't trust them to run a p*** up in a brewery!
It's certainly a mess over there isn't it, and I can't see an easy or a quick solution either. Then there's Afghanistan, another mess. Thought that the Taliban were supposed to be well and truly beaten, now it seems that they are on the rise again.
What an unholy mess it all is.
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Ken R
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Afghanistan is another "whitewash" job, expertly executed by our beloved leaders The Taliban were never defeated, the just bugged out to lick their wounds and re-arm ! Now they are back with a vengance
Ah well, I might just get the chance to top up my tan again  May as well do it at someone elses expense 
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marieann
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| Ken R wrote: |
Ah well, I might just get the chance to top up my tan again May as well do it at someone elses expense |
I hope you are joking Ken...........I'm not sure that you are though.
If they honestly thought there were such dangerous weapons being developed there I think they would have to do something. If as I suspect that was just used as an excuse then no I don't think they should have gone in. There are other countries with regimes even more tyrannical than Iraq's (which was bad enough) and they are ignoring them.
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Sandie Seward
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That's probably because those other countries aren't sitting on a third of the worlds oil.
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Ken R
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It's a shame it hasn't stopped the price of oil going up though isn't it 
You'd think they would give us a good discount on it for looking after it for them 
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Sandie Seward
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£1.15 pence per litre on the news tonight somewhere in the U.K. Unbeleaveable, how can anyone afford to run a car these days?
I don't drive mine much unless I really need to go somewhere now.
The days of 'joyrides', (in the original sense), are gone forever.
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Ken R
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It's not too bad around here at the moment, but you literally have to shop around from day to day. I put over £250 in the car last month, most of it was for business and I can get it back, but my private mileage still cost me around £50 or so 
Ken
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marieann
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We're putting in about £20.00 of diesel a fortnight. We haven't actually been far this last couple of weeks but it would have cost us a lot more if we had been buying petrol.
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