Bollettino

Today's casualty report:

"An American soldier was killed south of Baghdad today in an attack with a rocket propelled grenade on a military ambulance, the United States Central Command said."


LI's casualty reports are all so stinkin' anonymous. The military doesn't release names in their first reports, and when the names are released, they drift into the lower reaches of the news -- the Decatur, Illinois Herald and such -- and sink into that most newsless category, the private griefs of the unfamous. Which is something we don't even have to think about. The Iraq Body Count project is trying to recover the names of the Iraqi dead. They have a difficult to use site, in our opinion, but if you go here, and skip over the massive verbiage, you'll come to a table that lists 100 Iraqi civilians who have died in the conflict -- even, amazingly, post-conflict -- and what they died of, and when they died, and where it was reported.

As for post-hostile American deaths -- to find those names, you do have to trawl. The Houston Chronicle is a good place to look for announcements -- so many of the soldiers over there come from Texas. This weekend, for instance, according to the Chronicle, it was Pvt. Jesse M. Halling of Indianapolis who was shot to death Saturday in Tikrit. "On June 3, Sgt. Atanacio Haromarin, Jr., 27, was shot to death while manning a checkpoint near Balad. He was part of Battery C, 3rd Battalion, 16th Field Artillery Regiment at Fort Hood." And so the roll call goes -- to be greeted by the entire oblivion of an American population that has the sleepy idea that we won in Iraq, and that it is all over now. Last years hit. A golden oldie.

In the WashPost, a phrase of LI's -- used during the Hostile phase of the now post-hostile, 'tank lying down with the anti-tank gun' phase of the War -- returns from the lips of a man who never read it. We said that we were in danger of making the Iraqis Our Palestinians. And in Fallujah, the WashPost reporter captures this, from the mouth of a disgrunlled villager:


"I'm angry! I'm angry at this filthy life!" shouted Adnan Mohammed, who was wearing a soiled blue tunic called a dishdasha."We're becoming like the Palestinians," added another worshiper, 27-year-old Khaled Abdullah."