Have We Reached 50%?

I was wondering the other day whether we've reached 50% in the number of U.S. war dead in Iraq yet. I know that the CW is that, after the election, something is going to change in our "strategy" in Iraq. The reason this seems to be the CW is because a change in strategy (not "tactics," as the president said on This Week this morning) is the only reasonable option, and therefore the administration will pursue the only reasonable option. But I have little faith in this administration choosing a reasonable option in Iraq at this point, since they have failed to do so, yet, to this point. Stubbornness is not a strategy. It barely qualifies as a "tactic."

So, if you believe, as I do, that this administration will refuse to leave Iraq before January 20, 2009, and that the next president will have to be the one who "loses Iraq" . . . then we are looking at more than two more years of combat in Iraq. Iraq is in an increasingly bloody civil war, where Shi'ite militias are now fighting one another--one step beyond sectarian violence. The security situation is increasingly untenable in the north, and the southern part of Iraq is now almost as dangerous as Baghdad. It seems clear now that efforts to confront the violence only inflates the number of U.S. casualties, without improving the overall security situation.

How many more Americans will die to save this president from "waving the white flag" and surrendering to "the terrorists," or from "cut and run"? How many more Americans will have to die so that this president doesn't lose a war, in his own mind? ("In his own mind," because the war was never winnable.)

My sense is that we are closing in on 50%, but we're not there yet. That means, yes, that more than half of the Americans who will die in this stupid war will have died after (almost) everyone but the Decider has decided that this war was a mistake.

Btw, it's a little callous to focus on U.S. casualties, given the horrific number of Iraqis who have died since this war began. But that number, from a U.S. politics point-of-view, is irrelevant. Americans just don't care how many Iraqis die. It would be a much, much better world if they did, but they don't, and they won't. Ever.