2,686 - If You're Keeping Score At Home

Sergeant. David J. Davis, 32, of Mount Airy, Maryland, died in Baghdad, Iraq, on September 17, of injuries sustained when an improvised explosive device detonated near his Stryker Armored Vehicle during combat operations in Sadr City, Iraq. Davis was assigned to the Army's 4th Squadron, 14th Cavalry Regiment, 172nd Stryker Brigade Combat Team, Fort Wainwright, Alaska. This brings the United States' total casualty count (as of September 18, 7:48 Pacific Daylight Time) to 2,686.
So let's take a moment for some perspective: Even while the "official tally" of the deaths that occurred on September 11, 2001 continues to expand and contract (some say more than 3,000 lost their lives that day, the revised government number is 2,792 for the World Trade Center attack) we can finally find a connection between the events of that day and the war in Iraq. At some point, and perhaps the ambiguity surrounded an exact death toll for the day may be connected to this, there will be an exact corollary between the number of Americans killed on that one infamous day and the number of Americans killed in combat during our prolonged "slog" (Donald Rumsfeld's word) into the heart of Darkness once known as Mesopotamia.
So? How about a point of reckoning? At what point will the cost in human lives be worth defending Iraq's freedom? At some point the number of combat deaths will exceed that of the lives lost on September 11. It's accounting, after all. Numbers don't lie? People do.