One death, a travesty. Three thousand, a statistic.

Both sides of the American war debate recently observed macabre milestones from Iraq. The news of Saddam Hussein's execution for crimes against humanity, dramatized through video montages tracing his decline from defiant dictator, to lousy POW, to corpse, was received with delight and no shortage of smug satisfaction. His death seems one of the few pieces of objectively good news to come out of that troubled country; it is, after all, hard to mourn the death of a mass-murderer. But this news was soon overshadowed by the word that Spc. Dustin Donica had been killed in Baghdad, bringing the number of American military deaths in Iraq to an even 3,000.

Now, though he still lacks a definite aim, President Bush is preparing to commit even more troops to the fighting. I find this noteworthy because — in the same language The New York Times would use on describing Donica's death two days later — he was quick to term Saddam's execution an "important milestone." Perhaps he is unaware of the definition of the word — namely, a marker indicating the distance from a point to a particular place. It implies an end in sight. It suggests a countdown. It doesn't reflect how far you've come but how far you have left to go.

Four years ago, when the war was billed as one against weapons of mass destruction, our goals were unambiguous. At the time I, along with most other Bush supporters, dismissed claims from the left that the president's agenda was rooted in a personal vendetta against Iraq's dictator. Yet, years after we learned that the weapons of mass destruction-based grounds for war were erroneous, there's a question that isn't being asked: What does ending Saddam Hussein's life have to do with the reasons we came to Iraq in the first place? Let's not change the subject by insisting he was a criminal brought to justice — that's not why we went to war. Today, our oft-revised goals are so poorly defined I find it hard to justify his execution as a milestone toward anything.

But maybe Donica's death was one, in this literal sense of the word. Perhaps history will record it as a tipping point which galvanized the antiwar movement's resolve and marked the beginning of the end of the American misadventure in Iraq. But I'm not so optimistic.

My cynicism stems from the fact that we have chosen to observe 3,000 (like the two previous thousand-marks) as a critical number. The antiwar movement is founded on a number of grievances — the false pretext for war, the destruction, displacement and death caused by the occupation and the high cost of the war's prosecution in dollars and blood (to name only a few). But just as our military success cannot be measured by enemy body counts, neither can our losses be so easily quantified. I can find no phrase to describe so many lost lives, which has not already lost its meaning through overuse. But when I see 3,000 dead soldiers hailed as an important milestone, I have a sinking feeling that even the antiwar movement has lost some of its humanity. As a symbol, 3,000 isn't so much a meaningful representation of what has been lost, as an arbitrary, albeit (and perhaps more importantly) round number.

Americans, regardless of their positions on Iraq, will agree on the gravity of this loss. But perhaps not everyone realizes that 3,000 is also the approximate number of Iraqis killed every month this conflict goes on. Let's put our convictions about "us" and "them" aside for a moment to appreciate that our death toll of nearly four years is visited upon the Iraqi people every 30 days.

One argument says that ending our engagement in Iraq will mean all our soldiers whose lives were taken in Iraq died in vain. I don't think their deaths will ever be justified. But I, for one, can't stand to watch good men and women die every day, as our leadership fumbles at another shot-in-the-dark solution. Any course of action that seeks to achieve a miraculous underdog victory through the force of arms may intensify the bloodshed, but it will fail to bring about peace. Ignoring the lessons of the past and intentionally incurring future losses: that detracts from the honor and dignity due those who have lost their lives.

As the death toll climbs at the start of this new year, let us hope that at the very least, Spc. Donica's death was the first of the last casualties of this war. But let us not expect the war to end itself. As a resolution for 2007, I invite us all to become proactive in our objection to this war and finally bring about its end. Conrad Legendy '07 is a former Army ROTC cadet who has spent his past two summers in Afghanistan. He is a Near Eastern Studies major from New York City and can be reached at clegendy@princeton.edu.