They couldn't even wait for the next thousand on the odometer. Remember the big deal the press made about the 2000th death in Iraq? Now the magic (and utterly meaningless) number is 2500:

While there were no details on who it was or where the 2,500th death occurred, it underscored the continuing violence in Iraq just after an upbeat Bush returned from a surprise visit to Baghdad determined that the tide was beginning to turn.

In other words, we've now lost, over a period of over three years, almost as many as died in a couple hours on the beaches of Normandy (perhaps even the same number as were lost just in training for that event). Would the media have been so hung up on these kinds of numbers during that war? It seems unlikely, but if they had (or to be more precise, had today's media been reporting then), the story would have been something like this.

From today's WashPost...tell us Rand, is this the progress we should be celebrating? I can't really find the correct filters to read the nonsense you are writing with your comparisons to Normandy and celebrate with you....

The dust having settled -- 500-pound bombs can raise, and even manufacture, a lot of dust -- it is time to give the devil his due. To understand the diabolical genius of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, that porographer of violence, begin with this:

He was a primitive who understood the wired world and used an emblem of modernity, the Internet, to luxuriate in gore. But although he may have had an almost erotic enjoyment of the gore, it was also in the service of an audacious plan. And he executed it with such brutal efficiency that he became, arguably, the most effective terrorist in history.

{From George Will, hardly a flaming liberal in today's washington Post:

Zarkawi - the greatest terrorist ever...)

That appellation still suits Osama bin Laden because, as the animating mind behind the Sept. 11 attacks, he pulled the world's superpower into a war that provided the occasion for Zarqawi's rise to world prominence. Still, Zarqawi set out to prove that a central premise of the U.S. intervention in Iraq was -- is -- false. Or perhaps it is more precise to say that he decided to make it false. But if he could falsify it, it never was quite true.

The premise was that Iraqis are primarily nationalists and only secondarily sectarians. Zarqawi's wager was that explosives, used with sufficient cruelty, could blow that premise to smithereens. He may have succeeded. If so, the February bombing of the Askariya shrine, although the blast itself killed nobody, may have been the most deadly explosion since the planes hit the twin towers because it provoked sectarian violence that may now constitute a social firestorm.

A firestorm occurs when a fire becomes so hot that rising heat pulls in cold air, an influx of oxygen that feeds the fire. A firestorm is self-perpetuating because, in effect, the fire becomes its own fuel. If Iraq's sectarian violence has reached that point, Zarqawi had made himself somewhat superfluous.

It is sometimes charged that journalism, which considers the phrase "good news" an oxymoron ("We don't report the planes that land safely"), is missing the good news from Iraq. But so pervasive is the violence, and hence so dangerous has Iraq become for journalists, that the Wall Street Journal, hardly a hostile observer of the U.S. undertaking in Iraq, thinks the bad news might be underreported.

Even the good news often has a dark cast to it. At last -- 25 weeks after the voting -- the Iraqi parliament has produced a full government. But its first task is to conquer itself: It must end the sectarian violence being committed by people wearing government uniforms, in the military and police.

It is frequently said that protracted terrorism has an atomizing effect on a polity, reducing civil society to so much human dust. In Iraq it may be having the opposite effect: Rather than disaggregating Iraqis, the force of the explosions -- especially the one on Feb. 22 that demolished the dome of the Askariya shrine in Samarra -- seems to have blown them together, ruinously, into furious Sunni and Shiite blocs.

Just in May, just in Baghdad, sectarian violence killed 1,400 -- and that figure does not include victims of car bombs. It speaks depressing volumes about the U.S. predicament that the new idea is to . . . conquer Baghdad. On April 20 the Iraq war became as long as the Korean War. As of tomorrow the war will be as long -- 1,185 days -- as U.S. involvement in World War II was when U.S. troops captured the Ludendorff railway bridge at Remagen and became the first foreign troops to cross the Rhine since Napoleon's in 1805. And Baghdad beyond the Green Zone is a war zone, which accounts for the flight from the country of many educated and mobile Iraqis.
.........
YEAH...IT's The Media's Fault...Really even that liberal rag the Wall Street Journal..!!!! Right on Rand.....

From today's WashPost...tell us Rand, is this the progress we should be celebrating?

I didn't say we should be celebrating "progress." The point of this post is that the number of American troop deaths is a meaningless "milestone." Troops die in wars, and the numbers that do so aren't in themselves a useful metric for either progress, or lack of it.

Wish I could find links to some of the late 2002, early 2003 quotes I recall from liberal hand wringers who were claiming that American dead would number in the thousands within the first MONTH of an Iraqi invasion.

Rand,
Why shouldn't we celebrate progress?

Fortunately, the troops on the ground get it. Before that dust settled, American troops were pulling out intel. Before the media had confirmation that Zarkman had become one of Satan's 72 virgins, US Exploitation teams were using the information found in Zarkman's retreat to go down the organizational path of Al-Qaeda in Iraq.

In the first 48 hours, the news media was more concerned about Zarkman's second taking the reigns. During that time, the number 2 man was already dead or in custody. Since his death, over 400 raids have been conducted with over 100 terrorist killed and over 700 captured. Zarkman's death was more than just getting rid of a figure head. It was more like finding the Rosetta Stone for terrorist communications in Iraq.

Now I find this line from the Martian interesting: "On April 20 the Iraq war became as long as the Korean War. "

That's BS. The Korean War is still in a state of armistice. That war is no more over than the 1991 Persian Gulf War ended in 1991. If you think that war is over, go visit the DMZ. I wonder what Martian would have commented if Eisenhower had stood on the deck of a CV in August of 1953 with a sign in the backdrop saying "Mission Accomplished".

I think that will be the difference between Iraq and Korea. 50 years from now, we won't be talking about the Iraqi "No Fly Zones" still in place while Qusay Hussein continues to rattle sabers at UN troops protecting the Kurds.

Why shouldn't we celebrate progress?

Just as I didn't say we should, I also didn't say we shouldn't. I was merely pointing out that it wasn't the point of this post. Our "Martian" friend (always love it when these loons feel a need to post anonymously) was missing the point.

I got it Rand. I just think we should be celebrating, and I mean that in much the way that you are celebrating. Zarkman's death is a gift that keeps on giving to coalition troops.

We lost more in cold war era training accidents during the early 80's in Reagans first term as we have lost the analogue three years during wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Casualties have been astoundingly light by any reasonable and objective measure.

How many troops must die imposing Rand's glorious vision on the world before the figure is considered significant? Ten thousand? A million? Yeah, who cares about 2500 people right? Just some mere number of people Rand never knew and thus has no problem minimizing their deaths or continuing to see them killed.

wow X, you sure got Rand. Now tell us X, how many Iraqi children died while UN officials got rich of the oil for food program? 2,500? 10,000? 100,000? How about 500,000 Iraqi children, a number based on the UN's own UNICEF claim... but that didn't matter to the Kofi Annan's world order. It really didn't matter to Kofi Annan's son, who seemed to profit well while those children died. Most claims have the total death toll of Iraqis of all ages well over 1 million.

I'm willing to guess Rand thinks the lose of 2,500 troops is a noble sacrafice in order to save the life of millions. But X, you can just roll over and go back to bed as the UN watches 400,000 people die in Darfur. I have a good idea your what your world order is...

Wonderful posts Leland!

Don't you agree X? LOL.

Yeah, who cares about 2500 people right? Just some mere number of people Rand never knew and thus has no problem minimizing their deaths or continuing to see them killed.

And you did know them all?

Sucks to be a friend of yours.

>In other words, we've now lost, over a period of over three years, almost as many as died in a couple hours on the beaches of Normandy (perhaps even the same number as were lost just in training for that event).

The armed forces were a helluva lot bigger then, our medical knowledge and technology much more limited, and the nature of the war and training were much different.

There are significant other differences betwen Iraq and World War I and II. But, since you seem obsessed with these comparisons and impervious to any arguments to the contrary, recounting them seems futile.

BTW: are you a veteran of the armed forces? If not, are you planning to enlist? I would figure that a strong war supporter such as you would either be in the Armed Forces or Reserves.

If so, fine. Otherwise, you would be just blogging from the safety of your office about things you don't really have any first-hand knowledge of.

Ah, yet another invocation of the idiotic "chickenhawk" argument.

No answer. Zilch.

You and Glenn Reynolds and all the other war bloggers should go and report from Iraq for a full year.

I don't mean blogging and opining and reinforcing your existing biases about the war. I mean real honest to God reporting. Gathering facts, sorting through them, and telling honest and unbiased stories. Get out of the Green Zone every day for a year and risk getting blown up by an IED.

Until you do that, all your stuff on this board will be litte more than hot air.

Michael Yon is doing exactly that, as is Bill Roggio. Why don't you? Why should be care about your opinion about the war?

And this isn't a "board."

Moron.

Wimp. Wimp. Wimp.

And Rand, it isn't "idiotic" to expect someone who publicly opines as much as you do about this war and the media coverage of it to actually some experience in both. You obviously haven't been over there, and what you do here can't really be considered journalism.

It is tiresome to have right wing ideologues like yourself lecturing everyone about press bias when you make no attempt to do any real reporting yourself.

You're an aerospace engineer, right? Would you have someone trying to design a spacecraft or a rocket with no real expertise in the subject?

...it isn't "idiotic" to expect someone who publicly opines as much as you do about this war and the media coverage of it to actually some experience in both.

Then you shouldn't opine, either.

right wing ideologues

I'm neither "right wing" or an ideologue.

...what you do here can't really be considered journalism.

I've never claimed it was.

Don't you tire of publicly making a fool of yourself? Oh, that's right, you don't have to worry about that, because you make these idiotic statements anonymously.

Would you have someone trying to design a spacecraft or a rocket with no real expertise in the subject?

No, but this is a major category error.

Sorry, but the "chickenhawk" argument remains nonsensical. Unless you don't believe in civilian control of the military...