Entering Year 5 of an unpredictable war

[ProSense]

Entering Year 5 of an unpredictable war

By Joseph Giordono, Stars and Stripes
Pacific edition, Sunday, March 18, 2007

At 10:16 p.m. Eastern time on March 19, 2003, a grim President Bush addressed the world from the Oval Office.

Earlier that day, he announced, American forces had launched an invasion “to disarm Iraq, to free its people and to defend the world from grave danger.”

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On Monday, four years later, more than 140,000 American servicemembers in Iraq face the latest twist in a conflict that has morphed from an overland rush to a deepening sectarian conflict.

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By the end of 2005, three elections and the adoption of a new Iraqi constitution had buoyed American hopes that progress was being made. For 2006, the plan was to put the focus on training Iraqi forces and — possibly — to begin reducing the number of American troops on the ground.

But in February of that year, the bombing of a holy Shiite shrine in Samarra brought the problems between Sunnis and Shiites to the fore. By the end of 2006, the U.S. military and President Bush were discussing a new direction. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, one of the architects of the war, was replaced. And on Jan. 11, saying “the situation in Iraq is unacceptable to the American people and it is unacceptable to me,” Bush announced that new course.

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In today’s Stars and Stripes, we look at how a few individual lives have been affected by the past four years in Iraq.

link

U.S. troop casualties March 11 - 17 (this week): 26

[MADem]

1. Oh, I disagree. It's quite PREDICTABLE.

If we take the time to dig out the old Vietnam template, that is.

Ya gotta wonder, do we wait until we pass 58K before anything gets done? How many more?