Every death has a face and a name ...

Father John Whiteford posted this photo way back in 2005 on his own Blogspot Blogging site in commemoration, so to speak, of the 2000th U.S. GI to have died in this ill-begotten war (at that time). His arguments at that time were largely in support of the war and he even suggested that pulling out now (when he wrote the posting back then) would have been equivalent to pulling out of WW II at the time of the Battle of the Bulge during which the U.S. forces had lost 16,000. [To see his posting, you will have to go first to his site and then link to his archives for October 2005.]

It's not the numbers that grate on most Americans, Father John; it's each and every one of the youngsters who are dying daily ... and for what? Your picture of the cemetery at Normandy with crosses showing no names or other identification is very appropriate, I believe. What family wants to be a family that gives even one son or daughter to a war that will be "winding down" as of, say, September or so?

The following figures were cut and pasted from Father Whiteford's posting ... not to put today's count (somewhere between 3,000 and 4,000) in Iraq in perspective, but to broaden our scope as to the brutality of all wars:

[quote from Father John's site]
The following figures do not include the wounded or the missing:

The Battle of Stalingrad: 1,100,000 Soviets Killed -- 800,000 Axis Killed

Battle of Berlin: 50,000 Soviets Killed -- 90,000 Germans Killed

The Rape of Nanking: 300,000 Chinese killed

The D-Day Invasion: 37,000 Allies Killed -- at least 78,000 Germans Killed

The Battle of the Bulge: 16,000 Americans Killed -- 19,000 Germans Killed

The Battle of Okinawa: 12,000 Americans Killed -- 100,000 Japanese Killed

The Battle of Iwo Jima: 6,800 Americans killed -- 21,000 Japanese Killed

The Battle of Anzio: 4,400 Allies killed -- 5,500 Germans Killed

The Bataan Death March: 10,000 Americans Killed
[unquote]

And no, not a single connection between the U.S. deaths in Iraq and the 3,000 or so who died on 9-11 has yet to be made and, in fact, has even been denied by our own President since Father John's posting.