The US' determination to prevail in Iraq is "unshakable" despite the downing of an Army helicopter that killed 16 US soldiers, the White House says. Democrats called the assault a fresh illustration of faulty postwar planning.
Sunday's missile attack, which also wounded 20 troops, closed out a week that began with a similarly grim new record. On Oct. 27, three dozen people died in a wave of suicide bombings in Baghdad, the bloodiest day there since US President George W. Bush declared major combat over May 1.
Bush, spending a long weekend at his Texas ranch, said nothing in person about the helicopter crash Sunday, a day in which three other Americans, including two civilian contractors, also were killed in Iraq.
But White House spokesman Trent Duffy, in a statement read to reporters, said: "The terrorists seek to kill coalition forces and innocent Iraqis because they want us to run, but our will and resolve are unshakable."
The statement sought to remind Americans that Bush sees military action in Iraq as tied to the Sept. 11 terror attacks -- and as part of a larger battle to head off future attacks.
"Sept. 11 taught us that we must confront terrorists and outlaw regimes with weapons of mass murder before it is too late," Duffy said. "The only way to win the war on terror is to take the fight to the enemy."
Americans should view the deadly downing of the Army helicopter as the tragic but inevitable cost of waging a long war, US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said earlier Sunday.
"In a long, hard war, we're going to have tragic days, as this is," he told ABC television. "But they're necessary. They're part of a war that's difficult and complicated."
But Democratic presidential hopefuls, seeking the party's nomination to run against Bush in presidential elections next November, seized on the downing of the CH-47 Chinook transport helicopter to press the administration to justify the mounting American death toll and to explain its strategy for getting out of Iraq.
"We were misled into this conflict without a real strategy for success," former NATO commander Wesley Clark said.
Two other candidates, Repre-sentative Dick Gephardt and Senator John Edwards, said the US needs more international help to make Iraq safe.
"We cannot solve this problem alone," Gephardt said on CBS television. He urged Bush to sit down with foreign leaders, "treat them with respect and ... get the help that we should get from our friends."
Representative Dennis Kucinich, the only candidate who voted against the congressional resolution authorizing the war in Iraq, said in a statement: "This disastrous mission must be ended before any more lives are lost. ... It is time to bring our troops home."
The strike occurred as an ABC News-Washington Post poll, for the first time, found that a majority of people surveyed -- 51 percent -- now disapprove of the way Bush is handling postwar Iraq.
The attack was the single deadliest event of the war for US troops.
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