The Guardian, Spanish PM fights off calls to pull out after record death toll
A weekend of bloodshed across Iraq saw November chalk up new and grim records, including the highest number of casualties among coalition troops and the deadliest single month for America's armed forces since the 1991 Gulf war.
The killings of seven Spanish military intelligence officers in an ambush at Mahmudiya, south of Baghdad, together with the deaths of two more US soldiers brought the monthly toll of coalition dead to 111.
It also brought to 79 the number of US troops killed in Iraq, outstripping the total for September and October.
The flow of body bags back to the US and other countries made its mark on the political arena, with the Democratic party presidential candidate Wesley Clark, a former Nato supreme commander, yesterday describing Iraq as “a distraction from the war on terror”.
“Are we safer with Saddam Hussein gone? That's a very tough case to make,” he told CNN.
In Spain, the prime minister, Jos
