As always, Juan Cole is invaluable today. He is one of the few, the very few, in modern punditry capable of actually thinking.
In examining the happy decrease in the rate of deaths of U.S. troops in Iraq, Cole suspects that the troops may be spending more time on the base than previously:
Indeed, the sort of ground missions that might involve hand to hand fighting and high US casualties may have been replaced by air strikes against suspected insurgent targets. US air strikes on Iraq are up by a factor of four in 2007 over 2006, according to Newsay. The US launched 1,140 bombing missions in 2007 through the end of September, as opposed to 229 in all of 2006. The US has flown as many as 70 such air missions a day this October, more than at any time since the November, 2004, assault on the Sunni Arab city of Fallujah.
Obviously, for an Occupation military to bomb a densely-populated city that it already largely controls is a violation of human rights law.
Go read his whole piece. My post of yesterday concerned just such a bombing. That Bush would advocate an illegal policy in order to avoid headlines about U.S. dead in Iraq is no surprise. Averting a headline also means one less dead American - a great thing - but how many Iraqi women and children's lives are lost forJuan Cole Bush's political cover?
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