From the New York Post -

WE'LL soon reach a total of 2,000 dead American troops in Iraq. You won't miss the day it happens. The media will pound it into you.

But no one will tell you what that number really means — and what it doesn't.

Unable to convince the Bush administration or our troops to cut and run, the American left is waging its campaign of support for Islamist terror through our all-too-cooperative media. And you're the duck in the anti-war movement's shooting gallery.

Breathless anchors and voice-of-God columnists will suggest that 2,000 dead is an exorbitant price to pay in wartime, that reaching such a threshold means we've failed and that it's time to "support our troops and bring them home."

All lies. Certainly, the life of every American service member matters to us. But the left's attempt to exploit dead soldiers and Marines for partisan purposes is worse than grave-robbing: Ghouls only take gold rings and decaying flesh; the left wants to rob our war dead of their sacrifices and their achievements, their honor and their pride.

Those who died in Iraq have not died in vain. Even should Iraq fail itself in the end, our courageous effort to give one Middle-Eastern Muslim population a chance to create a rule-of-law democracy has been worth the cost — for their sake, but also for ours. Without a transformation of the Middle East, we shall see no end of terror.

As a former soldier whose friends still serve under our flag, I'm especially disgusted by the pretense on the part of those who never served and who wouldn't dream of letting their own children serve that they speak for the men and women in uniform.

Our troops speak for themselves. By re-enlisting. And returning to Iraq, to complete the mission for which their comrades gave their lives or suffered life-altering wounds.

Two generations of politicians and pundits suffer from their avoidance of military service. They speak of war in ignorance and view our troops — whom they quietly despise — as nothing more than tools of their own ambitions. After deploring body counts during their Vietnam-era protest years, today our leftists revel in the American body count in Iraq.

The left has been infuriated by its inability to incite an anti-war movement in our military — forgetting that this is an all-volunteer force whose members believe in service to our country. The best the Democrats can do is to trot out poor Wes Clark, an ethically challenged retired general who will say anything, anywhere, anytime in return for five more seconds in the spotlight.

As for that "unacceptable" number of casualties, let's put it in perspective:

Our current loss rate in Iraq from combat and non-combat deaths is 765 per year. That's painful for individual families, but we would have to remain in Iraq, taking casualties at the same rate, for 76 years to rival our loss of more than 58,000 Americans in Indochina.

And Vietnam wasn't remotely as important to our national security. The terrorists we face today are more implacable than any of the enemies from our past. Even the Germans didn't dream of eradicating our entire population. The Japanese hoped to master Asia, not to massacre every man, woman and child in America.

We would need to continue our efforts in Iraq and the greater War on Terror for 532 years to suffer the 407,000 dead we lost in less than four years in World War II.

And what about our greatest struggle, the American Civil War? We would have to maintain the status quo in Iraq for 470 years just to rival the number of Union dead and for 729 years to equal our total losses, North and South.

Even our Revolutionary War, in which fewer than 5,000 Americans died in combat (many more, unrecorded, fell to disease) has to be judged in terms of the population at the time — just over 2 million. Equivalent losses today would be over 500,000 dead Americans.

The point isn't to play hocus-pocus with statistics. That's what the pro-terrorist left is trying to do — betting that you know nothing of military history. Two thousand dead isn't a magic number. Our first loss was as important as the last. We must not make a mockery of our fallen by treating them as political rag-dolls to be tossed around the media playroom. Great causes incur great costs.

In historical terms, our losses in Iraq have been remarkably light, given the magnitude of what we seek to achieve. The low casualty rate is a tribute to the skill and professionalism of our troops and their battlefield leaders. None of us should breathe a word that undercuts them while they're fighting our war.

If the American left and its media sympathizers want someone to blame for our combat losses, they should begin with themselves. Their irresponsible demands for troop withdrawals provide powerful encouragement to Muslim fanatics to keep on killing as many American service members as possible. On the worst days the terrorists suffer in Iraq, our "anti-war" fellow citizens keep the cause of Islamist fascism alive. Their support is worth far more to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi than any amount of Saudi money.

It would be wonderful to live in a world in which war was never necessary. But we don't live in such a world. And there are no bloodless wars. We should honor every fallen American. But we also must recognize that, on this maddened earth, only the blood of patriots shed abroad allows us to live in safety here at home.

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