Danger Around Every Corner

ROBERTO SCHMIDT/AFP/GETTY
Soldiers grieve at a service for Specialist Donald Laverne Wheeler Jr., killed by a rocket-propelled grenade while on patrol in Tikrit on Oct. 13

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What's the Solution?
Inside the Pentagon, the brass maintain that as long as U.S. troops are dying by ones and twos, they can deal with it. But the steady accumulation of casualties is generating political fallout that goes beyond the President's declining approval rating. An unscientific but arresting survey last week in Stars and Stripes, the Pentagon-subsidized but editorially independent military newspaper, reported that half the troops serving in Iraq believe their unit's morale is low. A third said their mission lacked clarity; half said they were unlikely to re-enlist. Perceptions like those undermine military authority and help sour the U.S. public on the mission.

By last week, as soldiers emailed complaints to their Congressmen, a solid phalanx on Capitol Hill was berating the Administration for sending troops to Iraq without adequate protection. Some 40,000 soldiers lack heavy-duty body armor. Hundreds of units have patrolled without effectively armored humvees. And troops don't have enough portable electronic jammers to keep remote-controlled mines from exploding under their vehicles. Lawmakers demanded that the Administration budget $46 million to buy 170 more jammers and $181 million for 800 up-armored, or fully reinforced, humvees. Meanwhile some G.I.s were shelling out $650 apiece out of their own pockets to buy the bullet-stopping ceramic plates missing from their flak vests.

Those practical measures should help cut down American casualties in the near term. So should more aggressive tactics and better intelligence in the field. But there is no obvious way to stop the violence that threatens to broaden into determined national resistance, at least until security and government responsibilities are handed back to Iraqis and the country can stand on its feet. Any conquered people is impatient to regain freedom and make a new life. The analogy Americans might have to worry about is not the one frequently made to Vietnam but to the West Bank and Gaza Strip. With the Palestinians left too long under foreign rule, even the military might of Israel has been unable to quell the resistance or keep Israeli soldiers safe.