Outside the Beltway

2500 U.S. Military Dead in Iraq

James Joyner · Thursday, June 15, 2006 · 7 comments

The United States has now suffered 2500 military dead in Iraq in addition to 18,490 wounded.

The number of U.S. military deaths in Iraq has reached 2,500, the Pentagon said on Thursday, more than three years into a conflict that finds U.S.-led forces locked in a struggle with a resilient Sunni Arab insurgency.

The news came after a senior Iraqi official in Baghdad said his country’s security forces had seized al Qaeda in Iraq documents giving key information about the militant group’s network and the whereabouts of its leaders. “We believe this is the beginning of the end of al Qaeda in Iraq,” national security adviser Mowaffaq al-Rubaie told a televised news conference in the Iraqi capital.

In Washington, the Pentagon also said 18,490 U.S. troops had been wounded in the war, which began in March 2003 with a U.S.-led invasion to topple President Saddam Hussein.

A sad, notable milestone.

I’ll nonetheless re-post what I wrote on 25 October 2005, when the toll reached 2000:

Each American casualty represents a personal tragedy for their loved ones and should be soberly weighed by all of us. At the same time, it is low by any historical measure; we had more people killed on D-Day, for goodness sake. Nor is it an indication of the worth of the mission for which these troops died. If the war in Iraq was not worth fighting, then one death is too many. Otherwise, the toll has to be weighed against the benefit to the nation, which remains to be seen.

As I noted in May 2004, when the death toll reached 800,

Source: History News Network

As the data show, 800 deaths pales in comparison with almost every war we’ve ever fought. And, certainly, one doesn’t want to take the disproportionate American deaths argument too far when one looks at the two World Wars. We lost many times 800 in both the Mexican War and the Spanish-American War, the rationales for which are long forgotten by most.

Indeed, there are perhaps dozens of battles in American history in which we took more than 800 deaths. A very few examples:

Antietam: 3620 killed (23,110 dead and wounded)
Gettysburg: 7,058
Pearl Harbor: 2,403
Iwo Jima: nearly 7,000
Bataan Death March: credible estimates vary widely from 7,000 to nearly 10,000
D-Day: approximately 2500

Not to mention:

9/11/01: 3,021

(Note: Estimates vary widely for some of these battles; I’ve chosen representative numbers and given hyperlinks.)

Regardless of the position one took on the war at the outset, or even one’s position as to whether we ought remain knowing what we know now, we should hope that these 2000 lives purchase something worthy of their sacrifice. If they lead to a free, democratic Iraq that is a catalyst for a Middle East less hospitable to Islamist zealots, that will indeed be the case.

Postscript: Of course, 2500 means that this war has now passed the Spanish-American War, The War of 1812, and Pearl Harbor in raw numbers (although not in terms of population proportion). Of course, the Pearl Harbor deaths were absorbed in hours as a precursor to a much deadlier war. The other two conflicts are not considered among the finest moments in our history. The closing paragraph of the October post, though, remains correct.