Four Marines killed in 'successful' Anbar

Anbar, the sparsely populated province that Bush has been bragging about almost for a year now, was the site of four more Marine's untimely deaths.

Three more dead in Nineveh, which was recently proclaimed to be "pacified".

What a sorry mess. Feel-good reports are seized upon by the neocons as gospel truth, but when the bodies pile up in contradiction, it's always someone else's fault. Four and a half years into this occupation, and we're still propping it up with doctored numbers that, at best, show only marginal improvement. Bush has had a free hand on this occupation, with Congress basically only periodically asking "are you sure this is going well?", but it's still the media's fault or Congress' fault when things don't go the way Bush thought they would.

Saturday, September 8, 2007

U.S. says 7 troops die in Iraq

Americans were killed in two separate actions, military reports

LOS ANGELES TIMES

BAGHDAD, Iraq
Seven U.S. military personnel were reported killed yesterday, and a leading Shiite Muslim cleric started a new round of finger-pointing over who is to blame for recent violence among rival factions of Shiite Muslims in Iraq.
Military officials said that four Marines died Thursday during combat in Iraq’s western Anbar province, which President Bush visited Monday and singled out as the region where the U.S. troop buildup this year has slowed the violence.
The three other American deaths occurred Thursday in the province of Nineveh when military vehicles were attacked with explosives, U.S. officials said.
The names of the dead were withheld pending notification of their families. The latest report brings the total number of U.S. military deaths to 3,760 since the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in March 2003, according to icasualties.org, a Web site that tracks U.S. military deaths.