On Sunday, the number of dead in the Iraq war reached 4,000, a milestone that nobody wanted to ever hit, but sometimes the perspective gets lost when we begin discussing things like war deaths. Five years in and 4,000 dead and there is still no solution in sight.
In some ways, the numbers make the war seem milder than it is. After all, 4,000 in five years is just over 800 soldiers per year lost to a war. The numbers are frightening, but given the extreme numbers of people killed in gun violence in the United States, they are relatively small.
To break it down, that means an average of 800 soldiers died every year that we have been in Iraq. In one of those years, last year to be specific, 418 people were murdered in Detroit. That's just one major U.S. city with half the death toll of a war zone.
The perspective is not meant to minimize the importance of the death toll in Iraq, but it does illustrate that the war zone is not as deadly as previous wars have been. In the fifteen years that American troops were in Vietnam, 58,000 American soldiers died - almost 4,000 a year. Obviously then, the comparisons between Iraq and Vietnam are a bit off.
However, that doesn't mean there aren't horrible things happening to American soldiers in Iraq.
At the website antiwar.com, an information table points out that in addition to the number of soldiers killed in Iraq, there have been almost 30,000 "officially" wounded and as many as 70,000 more that suffer from unofficially wounds like post-traumatic stress.
The sad truth is that we have gotten better at saving the lives of American soldiers in a war zone, but no better at ending wars or the world crisis that create them than we were 35 years ago when we left Vietnam.
Now, with the presidential primaries nearly over, we have the Democratic candidates promising to end the war as a first priority upon taking office and the Republican candidate mostly keeping his mouth shut about the war while still using it as a campaign tool, relying on his own service and time as a POW in Vietnam.
And yet in the minds of most Americans, Iraq is almost a forgotten war in light of the recent economic news. The sad truth is that until it affects them personally or a major milestone like this one is headline news, people have let their concerns about the war slip to more pressing matters. Dead soldiers only seem to matter when they have a number attached or are a local hometown soldier.
Regardless of what candidate is elected in November, the war in Iraq must be addressed. The solution is not necessarily to bring everyone home immediately, but there must be a plan in place and right now, the only plan seems to be keep counting.
