1,500.

Yes folks. Another sad milestone has been reached in the war in Iraq. Over 1,500 American soldiers, sailors, and marines have been killed since combat operations began nearly two years ago.

Let's think about that for a moment, shall we?

1,500 troops. I have tried to put that number in perspective. Here's what I've come up with:

1,500 is ten times more than the people that work in my office. It's roughly one-third of all the employees who work for my county. It's about half of the number of people who were killed in the attacks on September 11th, 2001. It's almost equal to the entire population of my mother's hometown. It's more than the entire student body of most schools.

Scary, isn't it? Take a moment to think about what those comparisons mean. Imagine if the entire staff in my office (including me) had been replaced 10 times because everyone had died. Imagine if one-third of all the employees in a fairly large county suddenly died. Imagine if, in addition to the targets that were hit on September 11th, terrorist planes had also hit the Sears Tower in Chicago, the TransAmerica building in San Francisco, and the Empire State building in New York. Imagine an entire small town in rural America losing more than 80% of it's population. Imagine entire schools sitting empty because there were no students to fill them. Like I said--scary.

I realize that 1,500 dead in two years is a small number compared to the casualties in 2 years of, say, World War II. The big difference is that those soldiers died knowing they were fighting a terrible evil, one that threatened to conquer and enslave the entire world. They were fighting against an evil madman who had the ability to realize his insane desire for conquest through military might. They were NOT fighting in some third world shithole run by a tinpot dictator who posed no threat whatsoever to the rest of the world, but who happened to be sitting on the world's second largest reserves of oil.

THAT, my friends, is the real reason for this war. Anyone else who tries to tell you otherwise is either lying or fooling themselves, or, more than likely, both.