By Sabrina Tavernise
BAGHDAD The scene was grimly familiar. Three car bombs in rapid succession sent plumes of smoke into the evening sky.
The targets were foreign reporters and contractors inside two hotels. But the victims, as is often the case, were Iraqis.
The war in Iraq has claimed the lives of 2,000 American soldiers, but in the cold calculus of the killing here, far more Iraqis have been left dead.
The figures vary widely, with Iraqi and American officials reticent to release even the most incomplete of tallies.
But according to Iraq Body Count, a U.S.-based nonprofit organization that uses media reports to track the deaths, between 26,690 and 30,051 Iraqis have been killed in the war.
The bombs Monday, which exploded near the Palestine Hotel and Sheraton Hotel in central Baghdad, added at least 10 people to tally, according to the Iraqi Interior Ministry.
The bombs were coordinated for maximum damage, exploding just after sunset, when Iraqis were breaking their daily fast for Ramadan.
The second bomb, carried in a Jeep Cherokee, killed the largest number of people, including a 19-year-old named Beshir, whose mother wandered aimlessly through the wreckage Monday night, searching for his body.
"He told me he would leave this dangerous area," said the woman, who was crying and speaking to other women. "Death took him from me before he fulfilled his promise."
The United States military said last week that sweep operations throughout Iraq have brought the number of suicide attacks down sharply, with 22 attacks in October, compared with 58 in June, not including the blasts Monday.
But the relative lull in violence comes as the nature of the killing in the war has shifted.
Shortly after the U.S.-led invasion, insurgent attacks were aimed almost exclusively at American troops, but as the months passed, Iraqis - civilians, police officers and soldiers - have suffered far greater losses as insurgents, seeking maximum effect, focus their attacks on the softest targets.
Anthony Cordesman, a military expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, a nonprofit research group, called the Iraq Body Count figure "the best guesstimate in town" but warned that it was still very imprecise.
New war strategies needed
The International Institute for Strategic Studies said Tuesday that Western military powers were being forced to rethink strategy because conflict in Iraq has shown the limits of their conventional armies, Reuters reported from London.
In its annual report on global military might, the London-based think tank said strategists had hoped new technology would let them target enemies accurately from ships and planes, avoiding protracted ground battles.
But it said conventional armies have been sucked into messy conflicts, often in towns, where they face enemies invulnerable to the advanced gadgetry that was supposed to dissipate the fog of war and herald a new era in warfare.
"Iraq, Afghanistan and Chechnya demonstrate the limitations of modern conventional forces in complex environments that demand more of them than traditional war fighting," Christopher Langton, the editor, wrote in the introduction.
"The Military Balance" report said that rather than winning "network-centric warfare" using electronic sensors to find targets and direct fire, Western forces were enmeshed in "netwars" based on "agile and adaptive human networks."
"The conflict environment of the early 21st century certainly does represent a new era in warfare, but not the era that Western military planners expected," it said in its handbook, which lists the size and capabilities of the world's armed forces.
Using suicide bombers and roadside bombs, Iraqi insurgents have killed U.S. and British soldiers and thousands of civilians.
U.S. campaigns to dislodge fighters embedded in Iraqi towns have also involved losses.
"Dealing with this new conflict environment has caused a rethink for many Western forces," the institute said.
It said British and Australian special forces and the U.S. Marines were adapting to the new era of "asymmetric" conflict used by nonstate actors such as Al Qaeda by creating smaller fighting groups.
But it said there was unlikely to be any major shift in U.S. strategy or spending.
The institute said one bright spot for Western conventional armies was that they were still unrivaled in their ability to respond quickly to natural disasters.
