Tibet Protests Continue: BBC Report

U.S. toll in Iraq hits 4,000 as four soldiers killed

By Ross Colvin

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Four U.S. soldiers were blown up in Baghdad, pushing the U.S. military death toll in Iraq to 4,000 just days into the sixth year of a war that President George W. Bush says the United States is on track to win.

The U.S. military said on Monday the soldiers were killed on Sunday when a roadside bomb, the biggest killer of U.S. soldiers in Iraq since the 2003 invasion, exploded near their vehicle in southern Baghdad. One soldier was wounded.

On the same day dozens of Iraqis were killed in rocket and mortar attacks on the U.S.-protected "Green Zone" government and diplomatic compound in central Baghdad, and in other bombings in the capital and elsewhere.

What impact the 4,000 milestone might have on a war-weary American public and the U.S. presidential campaign will be hard to assess in the short term, but war critics are likely to seize on it to boost their case for U.S. troops to be withdrawn.

The White House said President George W. Bush was saddened by the loss of 4,000 troops and would focus on ensuring the United States succeeds in the five-year-old conflict.

"It's a sober moment, and one that all of us can focus on," a White House spokeswoman said.

"The president feels each and every one of the deaths very strongly and he grieves for their families," she said. "He obviously is grieved by the moment but he mourns the loss of every single life."

The United States lost 58,000 troops in over a decade of fighting in Vietnam until 1975, and 54,000 in the three-year-long Korean war that began in 1950.

The U.S. military played down the latest Iraqi toll, saying it was an arbitrary marker.

"No casualty is more or less significant than another; each soldier, marine, airman and sailor is equally precious and their loss equally tragic," a spokesman said.

Anthony Cordesman, a respected Iraq analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, said the 4,000th death could trigger another wave of polarized debate.

"Those who oppose the war will see it as further reason to end it. Those who support it will point to military progress and say that future casualties will be much lower," he said.

Cordesman criticized the media for focusing on the death toll when the number of wounded was "far, far higher and has more lasting impact as a human tragedy and in terms of costs".

Some 29,000 U.S. troops have been wounded in the war that has killed tens of thousands of Iraqis, as well as 175 British troops and 134 from other U.S. allies.

Although Americans are more preoccupied with domestic economic troubles, the Iraq war is still an important issue in the presidential campaign, with Democratic hopefuls Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama calling for a timetable for withdrawal.

Bush said in a speech marking the fifth anniversary of the war on March 19 that the United States was on track for victory and said withdrawing troops, who now number about 160,000, would embolden al Qaeda and neighboring Iran.

He said he had no regrets about the war, which has pushed his approval ratings near the lowest level of his presidency, but acknowledged the "high cost in lives and treasure".

Bush launched the war in March 2003 hoping for a quick victory with minimal casualties. The Iraqi army was quickly defeated, but within months insurgent attacks had bogged down U.S. forces who struggled to develop a strategy to defeat them.

MILESTONES

The 1,000th U.S. soldier to die was in September 2004, 18 months after the invasion and in the midst of a presidential election that returned Bush to office for a second term.

The toll climbed to 2,000 in October 2005 as Sunni Arab insurgents battled to oust the Baghdad government, and 3,000 in December 2006, before Bush unveiled a plan to send 30,000 more troops to Iraq to quell the violence.

"I doubt the 4,000 milestone will have the impact that the 3,000 did. The conventional wisdom then was that things were going badly," said Stephen Biddle, a senior fellow for defense policy at the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington.

"Today, by contrast, the public's general perception of Iraq is less negative, and coverage for the last six months has tended to focus on the reduction in violence and U.S. casualties. The war has also been much less visible," he said.

But the weekend barrages on the Green Zone, which houses the U.S. embassy, and the continued attacks on U.S. troops may indicate that Iraqi militants are trying to change that.

"Al Qaeda and extreme elements of the (Mehdi Army) have every incentive to find ways to raise the U.S. casualties between now and November and will be seeking ways to use bombings to raise the rate and number," Cordesman said.

(Additional reporting by Randy Fabi, edited by Richard Meares)

Video for Future Conversations

"It's real hard to be free when you're bought and sold in the marketplace," George Hanson (played by Jack Nicholson), Easy Rider

The largest community response ever generated by a YouTube video occurred this week, and it happened in an instant. In less than three days, more than two million people viewed one particular video, and immediately hundreds of people created and posted video responses. As of the date of this posting, with 2500 people posting text responses at the time of this blog posting on March 5, 2008.

It's not really important that the video is a political ad for Hillary Clinton using JAck Nicholson as a pitchman, although we'll look at what's being attempted with this kind of messaging. 

What's more interesting to note is the way in which video is becoming an integral component of online (mediated) social community participation. We ought to ask what kind of purposes this communication can support.

Let's look at what's going on in this video. Here's the thread:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6mOa3sXjqE4

The visual contents of the video consist of clips of Jack Nicholson's performances from Hollywood films---images and dialog which reside in the very peculiarly valuable space of the collective cultural memory.  This public commons is an imaginary each of us shares with one another, and at the same time each of us also has our private share of our own personal felt experience in it. We construct our image of ourselves in this space---it is where we literally learn our lines.

In this intersection of public and private reality, Nicholson remains inseparable from the character he plays in Easy Rider: an imprisoned ACLU lawyer who breaks out of his social

conditioning to become the archetypal participant in the counterculture, a cultural revolutionary. No matter what other roles we see Nicholson perform, he will always already represent the 60s social and political turn that his signature performance embodies.

It is clear from the massive response to Nicholson's return appearance in this week's video that this archetype hits hard enough to generate substantial creative participation by members of the YouTube social network.

The message content of the video is a standard one during this primary season: Vote for Hillary.  Clinton's campaign takes the basic evergreen advertising formula ("if you like X, you'll like us") and slaves our identification with the values of social change to it, like so:  If you like Jack, have ever wanted to go On The Road, would enjoy partying across the country, and wish to be part of a new and great change, vote for me.  The great omission putting the lie to the ad is only apparent to film buffs: what happened to Nicholson's character in the movie? In fact, what happens to all the main characters?

Everybody we identify with in the film is murdered. Nicholson's character George is killed early on by conservative 'rednecks'---his road trip ends almost before it begins, and he never discovers the America he's looking for. The search for freedom ends in spiritual disaster.

Video and text response to the Clinton video wasn't, however, an outbreak of moral outrage at the pillaging and misrepresentation of the cultural archive.  There is as yet no posted communication of an enraged loss caused when our most treasured memories---the ones we project on the screen of our own eyelids late at night, or perhaps in line as we wait to confront the voting machine, the images we access to remember who we thought we might have become---are wired up to the political-industrial-military-media borg.

However, there is evidence today on YouTube that such attempts to coerce us and persuade us to betray ourselves with the self-image we've pieced together from Hollywood storylines may be entirely inconsequential. The point seems to be that we're all learning to work with these memories and images too, in a vast visual and aural conversation in which just about anything is possible to be said.

What conversation do we want to be in?