A little perspective, please

As of 10 August 2006, after four years of fighting the Thousand Year War, there were 2,819 dead among the coalition forces in Iraq. Of these, 2,592 were Americans, 115 were British, 31 were Italians, 18 were Ukrainians, 17 were Poles, 13 were Bulgarians, 11 were Spaniards (who've gone home now, after the Madrid train bombings; they're getting as bad as the French), 4 were Salvadorans, 3 were Danes, 3 were Slovaks, 2 were Australians, 2 were Dutch, 2 were Estonians, 2 were Romanians, 2 were Thais, and 1 each of the Fijian and Kazakh contingents.

beginsarcasm
Horrors!
So many dead, we must pull out, unilaterally if necessary (like the Salvadorans and Fijians will stay long after we go), but immediately!
endsarcasm

Not to say that any of those nearly three thousand lives was not important (especially to their families), but a little fucking perspective here, please...

First of all, we're in a war. I call it the Thousand Year War, but you can call it the War Against Terrorism or the War Against Islamofascism or the War Against Ragheads, your choice.
In a war, you take casualties. Civilian (anyone remember that little incident at the World Trade Center? no, not the big one in 2001, try 1993, when they just used the wrong tools for the job) as well as military.
We can all (well, almost all) agree that the first War Against Fascism (or World War Two, as it's commonly referred to by historians and veterans alike) was a Good War.
Right?
Okay, then let's look at some comparative losses:
As of 10 August 1945, after five years (four if you're American) of fighting, there were 61 million dead among all the forces involved (Germans, Russians, and Chinese included). Of these (using the same list order as above), 295,000 were Americans, 388,00 were British, 410,000 were Italians, millions were Ukranians, 6,850,00 were Poles, 21,000 were Bulgarians, 22,000 were Spaniards, not many were Salvadorans, 4,000 were Danes, 400,00 were Czechs, 29,000 were Australians, 250,000 were Dutch, hundreds of thousands were Estonians (and Litvaks and Lithuanians and Finns), 985,000 were Romanians, a number were Thais, many were Fijian (fighting in British Commonwealth units), and an untold number were Kazakhs (fighting in Russian units). Along with 810,000 French, 750,000 Hungarian, 525,000 Austrian, 520,000 Greek, 1,700,000 Yugoslav, 85,000 Belgian, 42,000 Canadian, 35,000 Indian, 12,000 New Zealand, 9,000 South African, and 5,000 Norwegian dead, along with others too numerous to mention. (These casualty figures include civilians; outside the continental participants in Europe and Asia, few other combatants had significant civilian casualties.)

As they say, now that is a war. (Everybody played, hell, there were even Brazilians involved, and everybody got their uniform dirty.)

So, let us remember, in a Good War, the loss of 2,592 American dead is a good day.
As a matter of fact, that's almost exactly the number of the Greatest Generation that we lost on one particular day: 6 June 1944.
(That's D-Day, for those of you who might not have even watched Saving Private Ryan, let alone The Longest Day...)
To say nothing of the losses on bad days in earlier wars: 7,600 at Antietam on 17 September 1862 and 3,512 at Gettysburg over the 4th of July weekend in 1863 and 1,811 at Belleau Wood in a month of fighting that included 6 June 1918 (an odd coincidence of dates; it was also the largest loss of Marines in one day until Tarawa) and 1,000 at Tarawa over three days in November 1943.

So far, in the Thousand Year War, we've lost about a half a man (or woman, in the New Military) per day for the last four years.
Not trivial, especially to those directly affected, but not quite like the 202 per day we lost in the four years of World War Two, or even the 9 per day in our eighteen year involvement in Vietnam.
If this really is a Thousand Year War, as I fear it will be, we better get used to numbers like that...