2,000

Since the war in Iraq began, an average of fifteen U.S. troops have been killed each week. That's more than two every single day. How many people realize that?

When I think about this pace of loss, I keep coming back to one question: how did we get here? How did we go from 9/11---an attack in which no chemical, biological or nuclear weapons were used and Iraq was not involved---to invading Iraq for weapons it did not possess? What poses more of a threat to this nation: WMD's that were not used on 9/11, or our jingoistic, blanket application of a hyper-aggressive foreign policy manifest in our invasion of another nation on a false pretense? How did we go from the World Trade Center to deposing Saddam, guarding and rebuilding infrastructure, establishing financial and legal institutions, securing voting sites, training an entire foreign military, and battling an endless indigenous insurgency? This is mission creep that is equal parts folly, tragedy and outrage. We're not supposed to think too deeply about how we got here, of course, because doing so raises a host of uncomfortable questions about things like Niger forgeries and the subverting of prewar public debate via the outing of a CIA employee.

Two a day. Fifteen every week. At this pace, it is likely we'll be approaching 3,000 dead American troops one year from now---a fraction of the number of Iraqi civilians (this family, among many) caught on the "fighting them over there so we don't have to fight them here" flypaper about which President Bush so shamelessly boasts.

Over the past few months, I've seen a lot of yellow ribbon stickers on the backs of cars. And every time I see one, I wonder whether the driver really understands what "supporting the troops" means. Does it mean blindly entrusting our soldiers' lives to an Oval Office in complete disarray and to an administration that embraces a Soviet ethos of upwards-failing incompetence? Or does it mean understanding that as citizens, we have an implicit agreement with the men and women in uniform: they agree to give their lives defending our right to demand veracity and accountability in our leaders, and we agree to exercise that right when necessary to ensure our troops have a defined mission and a viable exit strategy.

Some will never understand this implicit agreement. The full extent and depth of their thinking is the "support the troops" mantra. This is partially a function of the Vietnam War, which gave rise to a sort of perverse Orwellian logic by which sacrifice is only valid and honorable if it's followed by more sacrifice. We were in Vietnam for over a decade, and lost 58,226 troops. If that logic had continued to prevail in Vietnam unchallenged, we might have lost 100,000 troops and spent another decade there.

Condoleeza Rice told us recently that she could not rule out U.S. troops fighting and dying in Iraq a decade from now. So we're getting some glimpses of the truth in terms of time frame. And that leads to the next question, which our troops are relying on us to ask continuously and relentlessly:

How many more?