Sometime in the coming days, the US military will probably report the 2,000th American military death of the Iraq war. While in some ways an arbitrary milestone, the tragic figure only tells part of the story when it comes to the human costs and human successes of the war.

Perhaps the most striking statistic from this war shows troops today have a much better chance of surviving if wounded. This is because of vast improvements in body armour and strides in battlefield medicine. The ratio of deaths to serious injuries in Iraq is less than half what it was in World War II. As recently as Vietnam, 28 per cent of Americans hurt in action died. In Iraq, the ratio is 11 per cent. About 15,000 Americans have been wounded in combat here, about half of them seriously enough to go home.

What may be most telling about the number of deaths is whether it creates a major shift in American public opinion. “By any historical standards the casualties are incredibly low,’’ says Anthony Cordesman, a senior fellow at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies in Washington and a former US Defence Department official. “But America has changed. On the one hand, Americans don’t have the stakes where their sons and daughters were subject to the draft. On the other, we have a media and a people that have been educated to believe in a precision, almost bloodless form of war.”

This milestone will be visited by both anti-war protesters and war supporters who say that the dead should be honoured by finishing the job. Who wins that debate will hinge on how Americans answer the following questions: Has the cost been worth it? Is America willing to pay much more?

Cordesman says at this time, the next few months will determine whether the military deaths will eventually become a rallying point for those who want America out of Iraq. Improved rates of survival also mean that there are more amputees coming home. While hard data aren’t available on the number of amputees, the issue has led to a boom in research and development of advanced prosthetics in the US, most funded by the US Army. Amputees are now being fitted with artificial legs, that have computer chips that ease movement and develop a sort of artificial “muscle-memory.” Also frequently neglected is looking at the war’s cost to Iraqis. Roughly 25,000 Iraqi civilians have died in the course of the war, and this year has been particularly deadly for Iraqi police and soldiers, who patrol the streets of Iraq without the armoured vehicles, medical expertise, and heavy weaponry that US forces rely on. Since the war began, about 3,300 Iraqi soldiers and police have been killed, 2,100 this year alone, according to a report from the Centre for Strategic and International Studies. Cordesman’s data show that the US death rate is very low for a war of this. But US support continues to slide. A Harris Interactive poll published in last Tuesday’s Wall Street Journal found that 53 per cent of Americans now think invading Iraq was the “wrong thing to do.” — The Christian Science Monitor