According to the Associated Press, as of this morning 17 mostly-young US service people have been killed since Sunday. Five on Wednesday.
The mortality rate has started to increase.
While politicians fiddle, Iraq burns.

BAGHDAD (Reuters) – Twenty-three people were killed and 83 injured in Baghdad’s Shi’ite slum of Sadr City Wednesday, security sources said, despite vehicle bans aimed at preventing unrest from spreading on the fifth anniversary of the fall of Baghdad.
Up to 73 people have died in Sadr City since Sunday in battles between black-masked militia loyal to cleric Moqtada al-Sadr and U.S. and Iraqi troops.
The upsurge in fighting comes as the top U.S. officials in Iraq testified in Washington that they opposed setting a timetable to withdraw troops from the 5-year-old war.
…
“The floor of the hospital is covered with the blood of children,” said Dr Qasim al-Mudalla, manager of the Imam Ali hospital in Sadr City, where he said four children and two women were among 11 dead bodies brought in Wednesday.
“What is the world doing? They have seen the blood of our children and are doing nothing.”
Other parts of Baghdad were quiet, with streets clear of traffic because of a one-day vehicle ban in the capital for the anniversary of the day U.S. troops rolled into the capital, deposing President Saddam Hussein.
— Ahmed Rasheed and Wisam Mohammed, Reuters North American News Service, (4/9/08)

Also in that same news report was this about how the rank-and-file Iraqis feel about the situation. Retired army officer Salim Hussein eloquently (and pointedly) summed it up: The past five years had yielded nothing but, “blood, bombs, curfews and in-fighting.”

Caught in the middle is the overstretched US military, which for the first time in a generation are putting non-combat personnel, such as sailors and airmen, in harms way — and with miminal re-training, if any at all — to man the war zone of Iraq.
This week, Iraq Main Man, Gen. David Petraeus, and his nerd-with-power, second-in-command Ryan Crocker, supposedly testified before a US Senate committee about how concerns in country are different than the concerns in Washington, D.C.
The slaughter has a spin.

Although Petraeus couldn’t offer any definite answers to anything tossed at him by the publicly-elected village idiots, the underlying sense of his presentation was of defeat, a concept he and his boss, Decider George, would never, ever recognize — a mob of crazed, armed zoombies would have to force feed the concept down their cold, dead throats.
And he used a choke-hold series of analogies to get the point across: “We haven’t turned any corners, we haven’t seen any lights at the end of the tunnel. The champagne bottle has been pushed to the back of the refrigerator. And the progress, while real, is fragile and is reversible.”
Couple that with the good general’s continous use of “conditions-based” references when he discussed troop withdrawals.
And the strong emphasis placed on the meaning of “while real” in regards to any progress in Iraq — backass backwards.
In other words: The US peoples are fucked!

Of course, no one on both sides of the aisle even hinted at defeat and getting the shit out of Iraq. No one in that Senate chamber even discussed how the Iraqi war was wrong, immoral and just plain, freakin’ stupid from its inception.
Jackboot John McCain has described the run-up and start of the war as “what’s past is past,” and supposedly now, is like, now. And Jackboot John will have the US in Iraq until the job is done — no matter if that job was dumb and illegal from the get-go.
And only the innocence of babies, ‘tards and way-naive US peoples would except that accommodation of the Iraq war to end when a different president takes office next year.
None of the so-called presidential hopefuls has called for an immediate get-out of Iraq.

Not to be left out of the Senate hearings lime/spot/light was US Ambassador to Iraq Crocker, who for once probably told the absolute truth on the Iraq war crock/spin:

WASHINGTON (AFP) — The White House on Wednesday distanced itself from the US ambassador to Iraq’s statement that Al-Qaeda on the Pakistan-Afghanistan border is a greater threat than Al-Qaeda in Iraq.
“The president is concerned about both, but I have not heard him describe it as prioritizing one or the other. Al-Qaeda is dangerous, full stop,” said spokeswoman Dana Perino.
Perino had been asked about a comment from the US ambassador to Iraq, Ryan Crocker, who told US lawmakers Tuesday that the group was more of a threat to US interests along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border than inside Iraq.
Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Joseph Biden, a Democrat, had asked the diplomat to say which Al-Qaeda wing he would choose if granted the power to wish one of them out of existence.
Crocker cited “the progress that has been made against Al-Qaeda in Iraq, the significant decrease in its capabilities and the fact it is solidly on the defensive” and, when Biden pressed him, declared: “I would therefore pick Al-Qaeda in the Pakistan/Afghanistan border area.”
At the same time, Crocker said that the group was “a strategic threat to the United States wherever it is.”
Some foes of the war in Iraq say that the unpopular conflict has siphoned off military and financial resources better used going after the architect of the September 11, 2001 attacks, Osama bin Laden, who is thought to be in a remote area of the Afghan-Pakistan border.
— Agence France-Presse, (4/9/08)

‘Full stop!’ What the hell is that? Where does Decider George drag up these people that work for him, which supposedly then in turn work for the US peoples? If these people aren’t being indicted, or under some kind of scrutiny, they’re dumber-than-living shit and say way-stupid shit.
And Perino is right there.

In most polls taken of the Iraq people the last few years, a very-good majority want the US to leave. The horror inflicted can never now be regained.
The blood of many nations are dying in Iraq.
The US, however, can save some of its best and brightest by leaving the scene of the crime as quick as possible.
The end of the abyss is worst than its beginning.