The view through the camera is dusky, jerky and terrifying: a platoon of U.S. Marine snipers trudges up a barren hill with nothing--not a rock, not even a shrub--for cover. Unaware that they are being watched, the Marines think they are on the hunt. An Arabic scrawl across the screen explains that the Marines are laying a trap for insurgents. The video cuts to a pickup truck, supposedly carrying jihadi fighters, racing along a dirt track through some palm trees. It quickly becomes clear that the trap being set is for the Marines, not the other way around. The next scene shows the Marines on the hill falling and dying, dust kicking up around them from the spray of enemy bullets. Then the video shifts to a hand with a knife, reaching down and cutting the dog tags off one of the fallen. The scrawl finishes the story: WE KILLED THE CRUSADERS AND CAPTURED THEIR LOOT.
The deaths of those six Marine snipers outside the Euphrates River town of Haditha, 150 miles northwest of Baghdad in the trouble-plagued Anbar province, was only the start of a terrible week for Lima Company of 3rd Battalion, 25th Marines. Two days later, 14 Marines, nine from that outfit, were killed by a triple-strength antitank bomb that flipped their amphibious assault vehicle into the air, igniting the fuel and ammunition inside and incinerating all but one of the occupants. The two attacks brought the death toll for U.S. troops to 29 in the space of a week and served as a grisly reminder of how brutally efficient and adaptive the insurgents are.
The tally of American dead also laid bare the impact that casualties can have on U.S. public support for the war and the stop-and-go progress toward a political solution in Iraq. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice likes to say the Administration is pursuing a two-track policy in Iraq: military plus political. But the two tracks are so entwined that problems on one can easily derail the other. Whenever U.S. casualties spike, as they did last week, the Bush Administration has to remind everyone at home that U.S. forces will not be staying forever. Anxious about slumping domestic approval, the Administration has recently been suggesting that troops may be drawn down as early as next spring. But each time the U.S. signals a likely pullout, the political factions in Iraq jockeying to write a draft constitution, due Aug. 15, immediately signal back that they have less incentive for making concessions on issues as basic as the role of Islam, oil revenues and political power sharing. Said an American involved in the negotiations: "The more it looks like the U.S. is gonna leave, the harder it is to get a deal that will enable them to leave."
In the war's constantly shifting game of one-upmanship, it was the insurgents who notched a new level of deadliness last week. The worst fighting is taking place in western Iraq, where U.S. forces are trying to disrupt Sunni guerrilla operations and destroy training camps used by foreign and Iraqi terrorists. Haditha sits on the Euphrates along a corridor of lush green hills and ravines that U.S. officers say has become a vital ratline for jihadist recruits crossing from Syria and a rest-and-recoup zone for fighters from the violent Sunni triangle. Patrolling on foot and in convoy, Marines have the job of flushing the rebels out.