2006 BMW X3 $429 mo/36 month lease; '06 BMW 325xi $434 mo;'04 Z4 Roadster $33,700 If you want to know why we have lost 2,000 Americans in Iraq, take another look at the news accounts of that milestone.You'll be hard pressed to find mention of the true death toll of this fraudulent adventure, and you'll not find an actual total no matter where you look.

Nobody knows how many men, women and children have died since the destruction and occupation of this non-threat to our national security began in early 2003, but it is many times more than 2,000.If that 2,000 is 2,000 too many, and it is, imagine living in a nation far smaller than the United States where -- and this is just one of many estimates -- that many people are being killed every couple of months.If you could imagine that, and if our news media could help you to do so, then perhaps you would look upon Iraq not as a remote strategic objective but as a human habitat whose suffering is not ours to offer up.Had we done that kind of thinking, we could have spared ourselves the unctuous eulogies about 2,000 of our own sacrifices, and left those sons and daughters and husbands and wives in their jobs and families.It is not enough, months after re-electing the arbitrary warmakers, to tell the pollsters we're dissatisfied with the progress of the undertaking and want to get out to spare our troops and expense. We needed, from the very beginning, to see everyone who could be spared. We needed to see the monumental waste of our tax dollars as a boondoggle for American construction, security and energy companies, among others. We needed to see the proposed exportation of our way of life and creation of a Middle East branch of USA Inc. in the harsh light of history.Factionalized Iraq is a Western creation. Saddam Hussein, now on trial for war crimes, was our contractor when those alleged crimes would have been committed. According to Paul Volcker's new report, he also was complicit with American corporations in the oil-for-food scandal for which the United Nations has been made the fall guy. Stuff happens to the best of empires.Our failure to see either individual Iraqi citizens or the big picture leads us into bogs like this current contretemps over the role of White House operatives and well-placed journalists in the exposure of a CIA agent. Lawyers who draw more income than entire Iraqi villages will parse the criminal charges while politicians and talking heads reprise Bill Clinton's sex life for proper perspective. But the real issue is a settled one. Scooter Libby and Karl Rove are not free agents. Of course the hawks held the whip hand in the White House and would not tolerate naysayers. Of course the "liberal" mainstream media passively and even actively abetted them. Of course we're not in Iraq for any of the reasons they keep giving in the eulogies."This war will require more sacrifice, more time and more resolve," President Bush said on the day the 2,000 mark was reached. He's right about the time, he's imagining the resolve and he's counting on us not to imagine the real sacrifice.I'm not waiting in line for rationed gasoline, looking down the barrel of a draft for my son or -- yet -- burying a loved one. I am typical in my insulation from the pain of this war. But I am aware of the human cost, as I am aware of my dispensation from it, however temporary it may turn out to be. That's why the 2,000 figure hurts so much. It represents a prairie wind of stilled laughter, a pandemic of stricken families. And yet it is too small to tell the story.

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