3,000

The saddest thing about the 3,000th American death in Iraq is that unlike the first batch of casualties, people getting killed or maimed in Iraq these days are really doing so in the course of a bad faith military option. Iraq Year One was a fiasco, but it was a genuine mistake. Since then, and certainly these days, we're passed all that. Nobody genuinely believes that they (or anyone else) has an Iraq policy that offers any kind of reasonable prospects for success. So young men and women are out there killing and dying not because the people giving them their orders really think those orders are a good idea. Instead, they need to stay in Iraq, need to keep killing and keep dying, because the idea of admitting failure is too much for some people.