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Posted on 09/13/2003 9:16:27 PM PDT by PatrioticCowboy
The true scale of American casualties in Iraq is revealed today by new figures obtained by The Observer, which show that more than 6,000 American servicemen have been evacuated for medical reasons since the beginning of the war, including more than 1,500 American soldiers who have been wounded, many seriously.
The figures will shock many Americans, who believe that casualties in the war in Iraq have been relatively light. Recent polls show that support for President George Bush and his administration's policy in Iraq has been slipping.
The number of casualties will also increase pressure on Bush to share the burden of occupying Iraq with more nations. Attempts to broker an international alliance to pour more men and money into Iraq foundered yesterday when Colin Powell, the US Secretary of State, brusquely rejected a French proposal as 'totally unrealistic'.
Three US soldiers were killed last week, bringing the number of combat dead since hostilities in Iraq were declared officially over on 1 May to 68. A similar number have died in accidents. It is military police policy to announce that a soldier has been wounded only if they were involved in an incident that involved a death.
Critics of the policy say it hides the true extent of the casualties. The new figures reveal that 1,178 American soldiers have been wounded in combat operations since the war began on 20 March.
It is believed many of the American casualties evacuated from Iraq are seriously injured. Modern body armour, worn by almost all American troops, means wounds that would normally kill a man are avoided. However vulnerable arms and legs are affected badly. This has boosted the proportion of maimed among the injured.
There are also concerns that many men serving in Iraq will suffer psychological trauma. Experts at the National Army Museum in London said studies of soldiers in the First and Second World Wars showed that it was prolonged exposure to combat environments that was most damaging. Some American units, such as the Fourth Infantry Division, have been involved in frontline operations for more than six months.
Andrew Robertshaw, an expert at the museum, said wars also claimed casualties after they were over.
'Soldiers were dying from injuries sustained during World War I well into the 1920s,' he said.
British soldiers are rotated more frequently than their American counterparts. The Ministry of Defence has recently consulted the National Army Museum about psychological disorders suffered by combatants in previous wars in a bid to avoid problems.
The wounded return to the USA with little publicity.
Giant C-17 transport jets on medical evacuation missions land at Andrews Air Force Base, near Washington, every night.
Battlefield casualties are first treated at Army field hospitals in Iraq then sent to Landstuhl Regional Medical Centre in Germany, where they are stabilised.
Andrews is the first stop back home. As the planes taxi to a halt, gangplanks are lowered and the wounded are carried or walk out. A fleet of ambulances and buses meet the C-17s most nights to take off the most seriously wounded. Those requiring urgent operations and amputations are ferried to America's two best military hospitals, the Walter Reed Army Medical Centre, near Washington, and the National Naval Medical Centre, Bethesda.
The hospitals are busy. Sometimes all 40 of Walter Reed's intensive care beds are full.
Dealing with the aftermath of amputations and blast injuries is common. Mines, home-made bombs and rocket-propelled grenades are the weapons of choice of the Iraqi resistance fighters. They cause the sort of wounds that will cost a soldier a limb.
The less badly wounded stay overnight at the air base, where an indoor tennis club and a community centre have been turned into a medical staging facility. Many have little but the ragged uniforms on their backs. A local volunteer group, called America's Heroes of Freedom, has set up on the base to provide them with fresh clothes, food packages and toiletries. 'This is our way of saying, "We have not forgotten you,"' said group founder Susan Brewer.
No, I'm not too much into OMG effects.
I agree, particularly with the part about having to go in against their will and I say that for one reason- I, personally, doubt that Musharaff could deal with the problem even if he really wanted to. It would be his downfall. The Pakistani military doesn't have a lot of influence in this region of the country that we're talking about here as far as I can tell. I can't see (and admittedly, it might be my own skewed way of looking at it) the Pakistanis working up a lot of fervor to go up there and fight these tribesmen.
What I'm really concerned about is those nukes. I sincerely hope that we have some plan to get in there and snatch those things if things get to a tipping point there or else things could get really ugly, really quickly.
You are so right. But when we factor in the nut jobs who are NOT in the military, and really don't like it much; but pretend they care.. why... lol! It makes the idea of a debate rather a sport, no?
Pakistan helped al-Qaeda set up shop in Afghanistan: US documents
...They nonetheless paint a complex picture of factional rivalry, in which Pakistan had tried to use the Taliban and al-Qaeda to promote its influence in war-torn Afghanistan -- only to eventually lose control over both of them.
"Taliban acceptance and approval of fundamentalist non-Afghans as part of their fighting force were merely an extension of Pakistani policy during the Soviet-Afghan war," said one of the DIA dispatches among US government agencies after the September 11 attacks but before US troops began their operation to root out the Taliban in Afghanistan.
It said Pakistani agents "encouraged, facilitated and often escorted Arabs from the Middle East into Afghanistan." ....
According to the DIA, the camp, target of a US missile strike, was built by Pakistani contractors funded by the Pakistan Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate (ISI), and protected by a local and influential Jadran tribal leader called Jalalludin.
"However, the real host of the facility was the Pakistani ISI," said one of the documents, which added that this arrangement raised "serious questions" about early ties between bin Laden and Pakistani intelligence.
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I think Pakistan has had a hand in creating a Frankenstein's Monster that they can no longer effectively deal with.
It's liberal drivel because in my city (population approximately 300,000) we have had around 250 deaths and countless accidents since May 1. This is not to minimize ANY soldier's death, but it's not at all unusual to have that number of deaths in Iraq or any other place for that matter.
Liberals want George Bush to fail so badly that I actually believe they rejoice at every bad thing that happens in Iraq. They want the economy to stay in a rut and they want the wars to fail, just to gain political power. POWER is more important to them than health, security and lives. It's a sad time in America.
Fortunately, the "soldiers spit on" stories are quite apocryphal - there aren't any confirmed incidents of such. There may have been isolated incidents, but it wasn't some sort of phenomenon. Now, the insults and such, those did happen, and were utterly subhuman things to do to men who had already had enough.
Snidely
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The seriousness of the situation is being minimized to the American public.
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