CNN Breaking: 2 US soldiers killed in Iraq raid (6:33 a.m. CST)

No link yet.

Two more mothers who will bury their sons, because of a small group of evil men who wish to maximize their oil and corporate profits.

Rest in Peace---NOT

Or maybe we'll hear about the same coverage, ie minimal.

2 killed, 7 wounded--at least what Centcom is willing to admit at the moment.

Was that the Iraqis or Americans?

Yesterday, hell this week was a bad, bloody mutha, they rolled out the bodies that were on ice while darth rummy was in country. I've lost track now, and there isn't any word from yeswterday's convoy attack, damn this sucks.

2 U.S. Troops Killed, 7 Hurt in Iraq Raid
BAGHDAD, Iraq - Two U.S. soldiers were killed and seven wounded in a firefight during a raid in Ramadi, according to the U.S. military. In a separate incident in a nearby town, eight Fallujah policemen were killed and five other people were wounded early Friday in an apparently mistaken shootout with American forces, a doctor said.

What are the odds of that?

Kevlar is some pretty amazing stuff. There's a display at the Infantry Museum at Benning where a guy's helmet took a 7.62mm round at less than 10 meters, and deflected it despite it being a dead on hit. So the torso and head are mostly protected- meaning that the majority of casualties will be wounded not killed. This is reflected in CENTCOM's numbers, approximately 1400 Soldiers WIA so far versus 302 KIA's.


So let's say that most units in Iraq move in at least platoon strength (ave 30-40 men); using that as a base, 2 deaths and 5 wounded equal about a 23% casualty rate. Pretty high really and you can see how it would degrade their ability to function fairly quickly.

The problem is this is going on everyday. We have 10 divisions, (130,000 Soldiers) in Iraq and approximately 50,000 Regular Army replacement units available here in the US to reinforce them. There are only three ways to aleviate this:

1) Massive call up of the Reserves and National Guard
2) Deplete other areas where we have troops stationed (S. Korea, Europe, etc)
3) Institute a Selective Service call up (Single Men, 18-35, who are not supporting a family or the only child)

My stand on this Bush* F*ck-up is well known- bring our Soldiers Home NOW!

FALLUJAH, Iraq - U.S. soldiers mistakenly opened fire on a group of Iraqi policemen chasing bandits Friday, killing eight Iraqis and wounding seven others, witnesses said. It was the deadliest friendly fire incident since the end of major fighting.

Two U.S. soldiers were killed in a firefight during a raid earlier Friday in the town of Ramadi, 30 miles west of Fallujah, the military said.

and in America, but I support the President 100%, yes sir 100%. Shit for brains.

America will never admit wrongdoing. The Iraqi people must unite in fighting the American jackboot. Iraq must be free, and America must withdraw immediately and unconditionally. If we don't, we will find ourselves in a West Bank and Gaza of our own making!

We already lost the war:

TRIBAL LEADERS and Fallujah dignitaries issued a statement, distributed in mosques, calling for a one-day general strike on Sunday and a three-day period of mourning to begin the same day for the deceased, who were to be buried Saturday.

http://www.msnbc.com/news/870749.asp?0cv=CA00

It appears that the lid had to be put on the action in Iraq while the sharks husstled support for the 87 billion.

I heard a republican congressmen on c-span in the house yesterday, say that he had just got back from Iraq and all those reports of chaos & disorder were not true. He said that traffic was flowing the markets were full of shoppers and that there were no signs of discontent. The Iraqis were happy and just loved the Americans.

What is the truth?

I didn't get this congressman's name.

You know, the same smarmy Repuke that accused Max Cleland of being unpatriotic. So much for his credibility.

to have your boy come home in a box. And its one two three, what are we fighting for, don't ask me I don't give a damm, next stop is Vietnam (Iraq).

Those who don't know their history are doomed to repeating it.

The military has been so disorganized in reporting these things that its hard to tell which attack is which.

Probably deliberately.

LIFE, the weekly magazine, brought the world to our mailbox.

It also brought vivid images of the human cost of war to the sheeple who, safely back in the “Homeland”, were so very proud to send their sons to “fight for democracy”. At some point, the reality captured in the pictures awakened us to the lies of our government, to the horror, destruction, and endless futility of war.

”

That is why there is no LIFE.

That is why there are no media images of this war except of waving flags and lying leaders.

Yet there are images. Many soldiers have digital cameras, many soldiers have taken pictures equal to, and surpassing, any of the LIFE images showing the human destruction that WE are causing. Many are of shredded and torn children – for these are many of the victims. Others are of young Americans, caught in the finality of death in blood drenched sands, for the oil drenched dreams of the soulless corporations that control our government.

Where is LIFE?

I remember being 10 years old and seeing the Life magazine with the picture of the young vietnamese girl who had been napalmed...woke my young eyes up...

But, obviously, the powers that be do NOT want our eyes woken up...

Life was a Time company (Now Aol/Time/Warner).

Until quite late in the war. Now, of course, one could argue that the photos produced a contrary effect, but if you actually look at the letters to the editor, it is difficult to uphold that position. LIFE may have been one of many sources bringing the horror of the war to people visually - and that is certainly more than we get today; at the same time, if you study the presentation of materials in the magazine itself, it was quite clearly a propaganda organ for the anti-communist extremists in the United States, and probably did more work to sustain and sell the lie of Vietnam than it did to end the war.

Sorry. pet peeve of mine. I did my senior honors thesis in History on LIFE Magazine's portrayal of the Vietnam war, so I've studied the issues from 1951-1973, in detail.

Let's not forget that LIFE was not simply a TIME INC organ, but that TIME INC was a Henry Luce organ, and Henry Luce was perhaps the most fanatical anti-communist (especially with regards to Asia) of the 20th Century. Y'know the "Project for a New American Century"? Well, guess who coined the term "The American Century"? Yup, Henry Luce. Luce was, of course, a child of Christian missionaries in China, and fanned the flames of the "Who lost China?" hysteria after the military defeat of his close friend, Chiang Kai Shek. And Luce's main editor for TIME during mid-century, Otto Fuerbinger, who groomed all the editors for Luce publications that were around for Vietnam, was a big fan of fascism, having penned several editorials that reflected favorably on one benito Mussolini.

The whole TIME-LIFE-FORTUNE ship was a rotten hulk of repression from top to bottom; it is the likes of Henry Luce that gave birth (in the case of the "American Century" concept, an imperialism plain and simple) to the neo-conservative movement of today.

So don't give too much love to LIFE Magazine.

In any case, I happen to own a mint condition copy of the February 9, 1968 LIFE, as well as a caseload of others.

First, LIFE was not "killed." It ceased weekly operations in 1973 due to profitability factors and the dominance of television. Then again, I'm only going by the printed and available archive rather than a romantic infatuation with LIFE magazine, so I suppose I hold little water.

What you're really describing is an overall shift toward secrecy in military operations *in general* that resulted from the Vietnam War. In this sense, CBS News brought the Vietnam war home no less than LIFE. Yet, CBS NEW is still around! How could this be? You are taking a general trend and focusing it on a specific site, without warrant.

As for LIFE itself, I maintain that it did more to sell the war to the American people than it did to turn people against the war (see, for example, their laughable story/ rah rah photospread on the Gulf of Tonkin incident, or the saccharine 1964 spread of wounded after a mortar attack at Pleiku, or see the propaganda stories that painted Ngo Dinh Diem as a benevolent father figure rather than a ravenous murderer), although photospreads such as the My Lai Massacre photos (first published by the Cleveland Plain Dealer, by the way) and the famous photos of Rocket Alley in Hue City (a tank piled high with wounded) did "bring the war home." But, again, CBS news also did rather hard hitting visual presentations (including great footage from Hue) that would seem as effective, if visual imagery alone is as effective as you say, which is not at all clear.

First of all, it is not my contention that images in LIFE had *nothing* to do with turning the "American people" against the war, so you can file that with other strawmen. I never made such an absolutist claim, nor would I. I think you give LIFE an unwarranted overdetermination. You make it seem like it did more than it actually did.

(One could note that the image you refer there was published in February 1966 - hardly a turning point in American public opinion).

At the same time, we should agree that the images in and of themselves do nothing, that they only take on a positive or negative meaning in conjunction with social forces. Second, one could just as easily take a slew of pics from LIFE magazine that reinforced the legitimacy of the Republic of Vietnam, or gave people confidence in the puppet government, or portrayed our forces as saviors against the evil "VC" insurgency, and thus come to the opposite conclusion. Moreover, the same picture during a different war (say, World War II) could inflame hatred for the enemy rather than the war. What's to say that wasn't its effect in 1966? Your ahistorical opinion? Your atemporal view of human nature? The picture is a social artifact that enters into a social configuration. It does nothing by itself; it means nothing without that social grounding.

As for your claim that LIFE was deliberately killed because of its imagistic power, that is simply nonsense and contrary to any evidence (conveniently, you don't produce any but strained analogy; one notices the passive voice "was killed" and simply wonders whether you know anything at all about LIFE Magazine). Read the minutes of the meetings at TIME INC and the LIFE discussions by editors in their archives, and you'll see serious discussions about profitability beginning in 1970. It was a business decision. Furthermore, LIFE continues (to this day) to publish powerful photographs in special issues.

On a brighter note, I definitely dig the LIFE covers you're displaying here. I have read, as I said, every issue from 1951-1973, and my analysis was focused primarily on the interplay between the visual and the verbal. I own all three issues that you've displayed here, but I do try to colect more where I can, so if you know a good source, please let me know. Thanks.

Still, I think you overestimate LIFE's achievement.

It is quite clear that "we" were not preserving democracy in Vietnam. To the extent that LIFE's photographs portrayed the US colonizing forces as preserving democracy (which they surely did), LIFE was a force in producing the war itself.

I have never been in disagreement with you about LIFE's photograph's having an effect. They clearly did. From the period 1951-1968, LIFE was generally a propagandist force for the criminal US aggression against the people of Vietnam (and Southeast Asia generally), though it presented specific images that COULD produce resistance to that war project. From 1968-1971, LIFE was generally an anti-war production, though it did produce images that COULD produce resistance to the anti-war project. That's what can be said, given the historical evidence.

As for the war itself, I won't even use the propagandist term VC (as Viet Cong), a diminutive term devised by the Diem regime to 1)counter the popular force of the Viet Minh and 2) dehumanize the popular struggle against western colonialism. "Viet Cong," in Vietnamese, utilizes the diminutive, and can be translated roughly as "Vietnamese Commie." I would no more use the term VC than I would use the term "Yankee Dog" which is its affective and cognitive equivalent. If the Americans insist on being called Americans, we should at least name the so-called VC what they wished to be named, the NLF, or National Liberation Front. Similarly, the term NVA is deceptive, since neither the Democratic Republic of Vietnam nor the Republic of Vietnam ever formally relinquished claims to a unified Vietnam. There was NO South Vietnam, just as there was no North Vietnam. Even the US military, when writing histories, uses the term PAVN (which you certainly know).

...the studies I've read that synch up best with my own memories are the ones that point out that the overwhelming media bias was (unsurprisingly) pro-war, pro-US, pro-Military and anti-Communist until quite late in the war. "Bright Shining Lie" makes the point in considerable detail. Many of the chief icons of anti-war journalism started out as dedicated, mainstream, establishment pro-war reporters. It took the general fuck-uppery of things quite a while to sink in.

This is important because it is one of the many ways in which the current situation echoes the Viet Nam conflict, albeit at an incredibly accelerated pace. The idea of the press as champion of anti-establishment perspectives is a post-vietnam, post-watergate myth. The media would, on the whole, vastly prefer to go along with the status quo, whatever that may be, while occasionally tweaking things at the margins. It takes a substantial amount of energy to force it off that default position.

The fascinating little discussion above seems to me to be a bit at cross-purposes: the question is, WHICH Life magazine are you talking about? Earlier or later? The one Luce wanted or the one his photojournalists and editors managed to discretely create despite him? The one he intended or the one we read, based on our own interpretive milieu?

I completely endorse the view--having been an avid reader of Life during the 60s--that it was on the whole a relentlessly pro-establishment document. It played a key role in the cold-war-mythologizing of the NASA space program, for instance. Look, it was a coffee table magazine. You were supposed to leaf through it at the dentists, or while dropping in at your neighbor's house for a martini. That just isn't the venue for hard-hitting, anti-establishment photojournalism. Such cultural artifacts tend to reflect social change, not bring it about.

And remember this: by the 60s, Viet Nam had become a DEMOCRATIC project. To be pro-war was to be pro-Democratic: this was Johnson's war-- it was Johnson we were protesting--in the early stages of anti-war activism (Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?). Virulent anti-communism is a prominent feature of American liberalism up to Viet Nam, with its own roots in the need of liberals to distinguish themselves from outright socialists and "the commintern crowd" (as dos Passos called them) in the 20s and 30s. That characteristic tends to get lost as the right and left have striven to redefine "liberal" in the post Viet Nam period.

That said, we DO need a "Life magazine" of the kind we saw later in the conflict. But then, we need a Bob Woodward too--but decidedly NOT the one we have now.

Class of 1920 (three years after Prescott Bush.)

Which included Hotchkiss, Yale, Skull and Bones.

However, I don't put much stock in the whole Skull and Bones thing.

This BULLSHIT WAR IS JUST LIKE THE NAM.

WHAT MOTHER FUCKERS !!!!!!!

I was in Tan Son Nhut too. Was in Vietnam for a year (civilian...not military) and was there in 68. Worked at Tan Son Nhut...lived in Saigon. Landed during the Tet Offensive :eyes:

When I came home, I joined the peace movement. And you are right...Iraq seems to be very similar to Vietnam. The "enemy" all look the same and they all want us out.

We seem to have gone from 1962 to 1968 in less than half a year.

But as one who also lived through that time, the sickening sense of deja vu is nearly overwhelming at times for me too (I only turned 18 near the end of the draft, and my lottery number was in the high-300s so I didn't get called up, but I came of age politically under the shadow of Viet Nam--my older brother and I both attended anti-war rallies and we had schoolmates who went over and didn't come back). I don't think the current senior military personnel, many of whom served back then, are unaware of it, either. Seeing a lot of evidence of that, in fact. Joe Conason had a good piece recently about how this is peeling military voters away from the Chump.

The Powell doctrine: we would never go to war without a clear mission and exit strategy, a doctrine explicitly born out of the Viet Nam experience. Now blithely tossed aside--and Powell good-soldiering along with it, to boot. Nor are those Viet Nam echoes merely coincidental: the architects of this cluster-fuck are Viet Nam-era chickenhawks who want to do it over again and get it "right" this time.

Sure come join the police force and get put inthe crossfire.

This is just another example of this president's failed Middle East policy and illustrates why the troops need to be brought home now.

n/t

US soldiers killed by Iraqi resistance

http://english.aljazeera.net/Articles/News/ArabWorld/Several+killed+in+Iraqi+resistance+attacks.htm

I will marry a Republican for anyone who can find the phrase "Iraqi resistance" in the US press. :)


Jeremy

It mentions several other attacks (and US casualties) today that CENTCOM is still denying.

For correlation purposes the other attacks were reportedly in Abu Ghuraib, al-Souq al-Sha’bi, in Baghdad in front of the Faculty of Agriculture, and in Samara.

Does Pravda report that these poor bastards accidentally died by running into Iraqi bullets?

Poor bastards. Abused misused, defrauded, looted. And then they die and their deaths are belittled for political capital for the Imperial Family.

There is no real reporting coming form our side at all, the media are total LAP DOGS of the Bush Family and their corporate handlers.

Look at the LIFE covers---- the same shit is happening now, I know it. Where is the outrage???? Where are the covers?

This ain't Viet-Nam to the public--- because the public is being spoon fed BULLSHIT.

could speak the language? I read that holding the hand up, palm out is interpreted as "go ahead", not stop? Remember in the beginning of the invasion when the car with women and children was blown up by our people because they went through the checkpoint when the marine put his hand up, palm facing out? God, what a mess.

edited for two dd's in ahead...?

I am so sad for the family members who get killed everyday in Iraq. Where we dont belong .

They should have died of old age in a nursing home, after a long, productive, fruitful life.

Not sacrificed in the CHIMPANZEE'S immoral war for oil and power.