Another Bleak Milestone

Don't expect to hear from President Bush directly about the grim threshold that was crossed yesterday, as the U.S. death toll in Iraq passed 4,000. White House policy is to minimize the significance of such milestones.

Bush was out on the South Lawn of the White House this morning, cheerfully blowing the whistle to start the annual Easter Egg Roll and getting a hug from the Easter Bunny.

Meanwhile, it fell to press secretary Dana Perino to assure the country that Bush cared about all the lives his war has cost. "President Bush believes that every life is precious, and he spends time every day thinking about those who've lost their lives on the battlefield," Perino said in this morning's gaggle, via Ben Feller of the Associated Press.

"The president has said the hardest thing a commander in chief will do is send young men and women into combat, and he's grieved for every lost American life, from the very first several years ago to those lost today," Perino said. "He bears the responsibility for the decisions that he made. He also bears the responsibility to continue to focus on succeeding."

But what's particularly depressing about the death toll in Iraq is that there's no end in sight.

Sholnn Freeman writes in The Washington Post: "A roadside bomb killed four U.S. soldiers on patrol in southern Baghdad late Sunday, the military said in a statement Monday, taking the overall U.S. death toll in the five-year Iraq war to at least 4,000. Earlier, mortar and rocket attacks pounded the Green Zone, the heavily fortified U.S.-Iraqi military and government complex, on a day when more than 60 people were killed in violence across the country."

AFP reports that "97 percent of the deaths occurred after US President George W. Bush announced the end of 'major combat' in Iraq on May 1, 2003, as the military became caught between a raging anti-American insurgency and brutal sectarian strife unleashed since the toppling of Saddam."

Here's CNN Iraq correspondent Michael Ware responding to the news last night: "You cannot help but take a moment to pause and to reflect. I'm sure soldiers and commanders throughout the nation will be taking that moment as well. 4,000 American deaths now in this war that continues to grind away where there seems to be so little insight that suggest it's coming to an end at any time soon.

"That, perhaps, is the darkest reflection of all. 4,000 deaths and very little so far has changed. . . .

"[T]here's still nothing to say that anything is getting any better in a real sense; that the fundamental building blocks of this war have been changed. And to now have the 4,000 American deaths really is a chilling moment."

Of course, it's been even more terrible for the Iraqis. Ware continued: "[N]o one can give you a figure of the number of Iraqi souls that have been lost in the five years so far of this conflict. But it's exponentially greater than two or three or even ten times this terrible number of American casualties. We're talking about -- on conservative estimates between 80 thousand to 100,000 Iraqis have lost their lives.

"And that's not to mention more than 4 million Iraqis are displaced from their homes. . . . And the entire social fabric of this country has been torn asunder with a legacy of this war that it's now divided along sectarian lines, Sunni versus Shiite, when it never was before. Not even under Saddam. So the impact and the toll that this conflict has taken on these countries is almost immeasurable."