Swamp Gas, January 10, 2008

by Frank James

A quick guided tour of the some of the morning's most important, most interesting, or both, Washington-related stories.

Projections by the World Health Organization and Iraqi government place the civilian death toll in Iraq in the three years following the 2003 U.S. invasion at 151,000, far less than the 600,000 reported in a controversial study that appeared in 2006 in the Lancet medical journal.

U.S. military and civilian officials are increasingly giving the Iraqis the space to come up with Iraqi solutions to their problems instead of U.S.-imposed answers with some observers saying it reflected a new realism in the U.S. while critics said it actually was a cynical way of saying that the U.S. was willing to allow what previously wasn't tolerated like sectarianism and corruption.

As U.S. and Iraqi forces launched an operation to flush al Qaeda insurgents from new strongholds, six U.S. soldiers were killed when a booby trapped house exploded, the worst single-day loss of American servicemembers in two months.

The Pentagon is preparing to send more than 3,000 Marines to Afghanistan, reversing its previous position, in order to surge U.S. forces there to combat rising violence and an expected springtime offensive by the Taliban in the southern part of the country.

President Bush began talks in between Israel and the Palestinian Authority in the hope of reaching a peace agreement but Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert made clear there'd be no pact if it didn't deal with Gaza from which rockets are frequently fired into Israel. Meanwhile, Bush confidently predicted a peace agreement by the end of his term.

A majority of the Supreme Court justices indicated they supported an Indiana voter ID law that Democrats and liberal groups said would unconstitutionally disenfranchise thousands of poor voters.

Sen. Hillary Clinton's campaign won its surprising New Hampshire Primary victory because of a ground game that focused on turning out women voters, including aggressive activity by independent groups that sometimes crossed the line into dubious territory in terms of mischaracterizing Sen. Barack Obama's positions on key issues.

Fresh off his victory in New Hampshire, Sen. John McCain visited South Carolina where he was routed by then Texas Gov. George Bush in 2000 after an ugly campaign that caught McCain off-guard. This time, McCain came prepared to rebut smears, fielding a truth squad in the state.

New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson was expected to drop out of the race for the Democratic presidential nomination today after relatively poor showings in the New Hampshire Primary and the Iowa caucuses.

A suicide bomber killed 22 people in Lahore, Pakistan, exploding a bomb among police guarding the high courrs. Islamic extremists were suspected.