365*5=1825
4000/1825=2.2 troops per day
BAGHDAD, March 24 (Reuters) – Four U.S. soldiers were blown up in Baghdad, pushing the U.S. military death toll in Iraq to 4,000 just days into the sixth year of a war that President George W. Bush says the United States is on track to win.
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The United States lost 58,000 troops in over a decade of fighting in Vietnam until 1975, and 54,000 in the three-year-long Korean war that began in 1950.
The U.S. military played down the latest Iraqi toll, saying it was an arbitrary marker.
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Some 29,000 U.S. troops have been wounded in the war that has killed tens of thousands of Iraqis, as well as 175 British troops and 134 from other U.S. allies.
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Bush said in a speech marking the fifth anniversary of the war on March 19 that the United States was on track for victory and said withdrawing troops, who now number about 160,000, would embolden al Qaeda and neighbouring Iran.
He said he had no regrets about the war, which has pushed his approval ratings near the lowest level of his presidency, but acknowledged the “high cost in lives and treasure”.
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The 1,000th U.S. soldier to die was in September 2004, 18 months after the invasion and in the midst of a presidential election that returned Bush to office for a second term.
The toll climbed to 2,000 in October 2005 as Sunni Arab insurgents battled to oust the Baghdad government, and 3,000 in December 2006, before Bush unveiled a plan to send 30,000 more troops to Iraq to quell the violence.
“I doubt the 4,000 milestone will have the impact that the 3,000 did. The conventional wisdom then was that things were going badly,” said Stephen Biddle, a senior fellow for defence policy at the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington.
