Good Morning.

I touched upon it briefly last Friday on the actual anniversary....but we'll let the dates speak for themself further below.

We'll start this morning as we always do; with the latest casualty figures from our ongoing wars, courtesy of Antiwar.com:

American Deaths
Since war began (3/19/03): 4477
Since "Mission Accomplished" (5/1/03): 4338
Since Handover (6/29/04): 3618
Since Obama Inauguration (1/20/09): 249
Since Operation New Dawn: 49

Other Coalition Troops - Iraq: 318
US Military Deaths - Afghanistan: 1,802
Other Military Deaths - Afghanistan: 954
Contractor Employee Deaths - Iraq: 1,487
Journalists - Iraq : 348
Academics Killed - Iraq: 448


We find this morning's cost of war passing through:

$ 1, 261, 854, 850, 000 .00


This past Friday marked 10 years that we've been at war. A decade is an awfully long time, in American terms. Think of something you've done for ten consecutive years. Have you been married that long? Stayed at one job that long? Lived in the same house for ten years?


There's some context to consider...I've listed out some of America's conflicts below, in roughly chronological order. There's probably a few things I've missed.

The Revolutionary war lasted 3,059 days. (8 years, 4 months, 15 days)

The War of 1812 lasted 975 days. (2 years, 8 months)

The Mexican-American war lasted 648 days (1 year, 9 months, 8 days)

The Civil War lasted 1,458 days (3 years, 11 months, 28 days)

The Spanish American war lasted a mere 109 days.

Our involvement in WWI lasted 584 days (1 year, 7 months, 5 days)

Our involvement in WWII lasted 1,364 days (3 years, 8 months, 25 days)

The fighting part of Korea lasted 1,128 days (3 years, 1 month, 2 days) We are technically still at war there; an Armistice was signed, but a peace treaty has never been achieved.

The Vietnam war is the most nebulous of our wars; there appears to be no clearly-defined starting date. No declaration of war was made, no one incident precipitated the US involvement (although the Gulf of Tonkin initiated our escalation). Historically, the entire Vietnam conflict lasted 7,120 days (19 years, 6 months, 29 days)...although our involvement was actually longer, if you count the advisors to the French on the ground as early as 1950.

The First Gulf war lasted 210 days (6 months, 26 days)

Which finally brings us to our current conflicts.

Today is our 3,656th day in Afghanistan (10 years, 4 days)

Today is our 3,128th day in Iraq (8 years, 6 months, 22 days)


And I'll leave you with an academic exercise. Counting from the ratification of the constitution, we've been a nation for some 81,560 days (223 years, 3 months, 20 days.)

We've been at some form of war for 20,380 of those days (around 55 years) or about 25% of the time we've existed as a nation.

Kinda makes you go hmmmmmm, doesn't it?