WASHINGTON — The number of U.S. service members killed and wounded in Iraq has more than doubled in the past four months compared with the four months preceding them, according to Pentagon statistics.
From Sept. 1 through Friday, 145 service members were killed in action in Iraq, compared with 65 from May 1 to Aug. 30. The two four-month intervals cover counterinsurgency operations, far costlier than major combat operations, which President Bush declared over on May 1.
Increases in those wounded in action have been equally dramatic this fall. Since Sept. 1, 1,209 soldiers have received battlefield wounds, more than twice the 574 wounded in action from May 1 through Aug. 30.
Nor have casualties tapered off since the capture of former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein on Dec. 13. Through Friday, 12 service members have been killed in action and 105 have been wounded with Hussein in custody.
After a summer in which U.S. military commanders believed they were about to turn a corner and see a significant decline in casualties, attacks on American forces increased dramatically in October and early November, prompting a U.S. counteroffensive that culminated in Hussein’s capture near Tikrit.
"The rate of casualties over the last four months is an indication that the insurgents are getting better organized," said retired Lt. Col. Andrew Krepinevich, director of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, a Washington, D.C., think tank. "The insurgents have been encouraged by the fact that they have had some success."
But casualties are far from "mission-threatening," Krepinevich said, adding that the real key to success depends upon "the will of the American people to continue to accept this level of casualties, which — by the way — is far lower than anything we experienced in the Vietnam War."
"It would take years at this casualty rate to arrive at the number killed in an hour at the World Trade Center," he added.
Nevertheless, Americans are clearly growing weary of casualties. Washington Post-ABC News polling data from late March, during major combat operations, showed that 58 percent of Americans interviewed said they thought the number of casualties in Iraq was acceptable, with 34 percent saying the number was unacceptable.
The latest results, based on interviews conducted Dec. 18-21 with 1,001 randomly selected adults nationwide, indicate that those percentages have flipped, with only 33 percent saying the number of casualties is acceptable and 64 percent saying it is unacceptable.
Yet support for the war remained solid. Asked whether the war in Iraq was worth fighting, considering the costs and the benefits to the United States, 59 percent said it was.
"Despite the myth that the American public is casualty-averse, the nation has traditionally accepted casualties if the public thinks that the cause is just and there is a definable end state," said retired Marine Col. Gary Anderson, a consultant to the Pentagon on Iraqi security issues.
But support for the war could erode dramatically, defense analysts and public opinion experts said, if casualties continue at a relatively high rate next year and start to have the effect of undermining public confidence in the mission.
Since the war began on March 19, a total of 470 service members have died in Iraq: 325 were killed in action, and 145 have died in non-hostile circumstances involving accidents and suicides. The number killed in action in the war’s counterinsurgency phase, 210, is nearly twice the 115 battlefield fatalities during major combat operations.
The number of soldiers wounded in action totaled 2,333, with an additional 370 injured in non-hostile circumstances, for a total of 2,706. The total wounded in action in counterinsurgency operations, 1,786, is now more than three times the 550 wounded in action during major combat operations.
Peter Feaver, a professor of political science at Duke University and an expert on war and public opinion, said continued casualties could reach a "tipping point" at which the Bush administration loses the most important element in public support for the war: a belief that success is likely.
While Hussein’s capture earlier this month helped bolster that belief, Feaver said, the steady "drip-drip-drip of casualties" and criticism of the war by Democratic candidates in next year’s presidential election is likely to bring support for the war back down again.
A single event that causes a large number of U.S. casualties, such as the 1983 bombing of the Marine barracks in Lebanon, could push the public toward the tipping point, said retired Marine Lt. Col. Gary Solis, the Marine Corps’ chief of oral history.
"We’ve never been as casualty-averse as either the politicians said or the military thought," Solis said, speaking for himself, not the Marine Corps. "But that can change in an instant."
Feaver said he is not surprised by the lack of public outcry thus far about casualties in Iraq. "The public has responded to the casualties in a way that is contrary to the conventional Beltway wisdom but perfectly in keeping with the academic scholarship on the issue," he said. "The Beltway wisdom is that public support collapses in the face of casualties, and by casualties I mean fatalities. But the academic research shows that public support is far more robust," as long as people feel the stakes are important and believe success is likely.
Eliot Cohen, a professor of national security studies at Johns Hopkins University, said that 3,117 service members "is, indeed, a lot of casualties." But the effect, he said, is being mitigated by a number of factors, including improved medical care and body armor, that are keeping far more troops alive, and an almost total ban on news coverage of the wounded as they return to the United States at Andrews Air Force Base outside Washington. While stories have been written and broadcast about individual casualties recuperating from wounds received in Iraq, there has been almost no coverage in the media of large aircraft arriving almost nightly at Andrews carrying war wounded from the battlefield. Similarly, press coverage of bodies arriving at the mortuary at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware has been prohibited.
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