3500 plus

According to the Associated Press count, 3501 US service personnel have been killed in Iraq in the last four years. The British government acknowledged that their combat death toll is now 150.

The four-year U.S. military death toll in Iraq passed 3,500 after a soldier was reported killed in a roadside bombing in Baghdad. A British soldier was also shot to death Thursday in southern Iraq, as Western forces find themselves increasingly vulnerable under a new strategy to take the fight to the enemy.

[...]

A U.S. soldier was killed and two others were wounded Wednesday when a roadside bomb exploded during combat operations in a southwestern section of Baghdad, the military said Thursday. At least 3,501 U.S. service-members have been killed since the beginning of the war, according to an Associated Press count.

They include at least 23 American deaths during the first six days of June -- an average of almost four per day, a similar pace to that in May. American troops deaths reached 127 in May, making it the third-deadliest month since the war started in March 2003. The average is nearly double the roughly two a day killed in June 2006.

A British soldier also was shot to death and three others were wounded Thursday while on patrol in southern Iraq, according to Britain's Ministry of Defense, pushing to at least 150 the number of deaths reported by the British military.

Deanie Mills has gathered in some comments from the troops on the ground in Iraq. Read them while you can because since a crackdown by the US military on the blogs and emails of US service personnel almost all military blogs originating from Iraq have disappeared.

The number of Iraqi civilians killed since the Bush administration launched an unprovoked invasion of Iraq stands somewhere between 65,000 and 71,203. Those figures are based on open source news reports and may not reflect the actual total.

And the question which was asked in the early 1970s during the Viet Nam conflict bears repeating:

How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake? (Or, in this case, a lie.)

But Iraq is not Viet Nam. It's hotter and drier.