Oct 27, 2005 2 min read

The milestone was inevitable to anyone who’s been paying even remote attention: Two-thousand members of the U.S. military have now been killed in Iraq, which remains an unsettled and dangerous land more than two years after President Bush sent troops there under the false pretense of finding weapons of mass destruction. And now Bush, furthering a story line that has served up more twists and turns than a murder mystery, is warning the nation to brace for an even higher casualty count. With two years’ worth of crowing about how Iraqis are being trained to defend their own country, and with the much-ballyhooed adoption of an Iraqi constitution, shouldn’t the projected U.S. death count be headed in the opposite direction? It should be high time for that baton to be passed to the liberated country.

But when Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice can’t guarantee a U.S. exit from Iraq within 10 years, only a fool wouldn’t see that the proverbial jig is up in this increasingly ominous situation. And only the village idiot would look back in retrospect and not feel misled about the whole seedy affair, replete with lie upon lie, deception upon deception and spin upon spin.

Instead of dealing honestly with reality – starting with explaining why troops continue dying senselessly more than two years after “victory” was declared – Army brass are caught up in their own Vietnam-style script. Their official press mouthpiece said recently via e-mail that the 2,000th death was an “artificial mark on the wall” and that the true milestones of the war were “rarely covered or discussed.” Neither is true. But when things aren’t going well, or even as planned, officialdom’s patented measures of last resort are to kill the messenger or point to something else as a diversion.

Increasingly, the administration chooses to play the only card left in its deck, equating the war in Iraq to the war on terrorism. It’s a dubious connection, but to the extent it’s become true, the U.S. military presence has provided fuel for that linkage.

The deaths of 2,000 Americans provide no “artificial mark on the wall,” and such a life-diminishing statement is quite offensive. That number of deaths should force everyone to undergo an inventory of what this war is really about, and whether its execution is worth continued support or fresh condemnation.