4000 casualites, 96 years to go

At the current rate, at the end of 100 years there will be 80,000 U.S. casualties from the Iraqi war. And at the current rate of U.S. wounded, there will be approximately 600,000 wounded soldiers.

It's a lot harder to get an accurate count on the number of dead and wounded Iraqis - be they friend or foe. The numbers are all over the place and the U.S. does not officially release numbers of Iraqi deaths - be they civilian or enemy. The U.S. military does maintain estimates of enemy troops killed in action, they just don't release them for a number of reasons, the main one, being it's bad politics, and the second one is called Vietnam.

The high figure of Iraqi death seems to be 1.2 million from justforeign.policy.org. Lancet, the British Medical Journal commissioned a statistical survey that was used to develop these numbers but the results have been criticized by a number of organizations citing serious study flaws. One can easily imagine how difficult it would be for British citizens to go about in Iraq trying to randomly sample a subset of the population to fairly and accurately determine the number of deaths. Criticize it all you want, but to my knowledge this is the only study that has tried to accurately determine the total number of Iraqi deaths as result of this war.

Another group, the Iraq Body Count (http://www.iraqbodycount.org) uses news accounts to determine the number of civilian deaths and their most recent estimate is between 82,400 and 90,000. Remember these are just civilian deaths. These do not include enemy combatants or whatever term you wish to use to describe the enemy, so the 1.2 million number may be plausible.

You'll notice that the Iraqi civilian casualties are 20 times U.S. casualties so you easily see who's bearing the brunt of human death and destruction in the war.

All told it's a lot and to paraphrase Virginia Woolf, "Politics, and by its faults the world, is strewn with the wreckage of those who have minded beyond reason the opinion of others". One is left to wonder just how much longer Americans will tolerate the wreckage.