I haven’t read a dead tree edition of Time Magazine in many, many years but one of my favorite Departments used to be “Milestones” that was actually run as a separate page of the Magazine. In it, they marked the passage of famous people, reported on births, accomplishments, and sometimes unusual or interesting happenings around the world.

But when I read this lone Associated Press story marking the “milestone” of war casualties equaling in number the victims of the attack on 9/11, my jaw did a little floor scraping:

Now the death toll is 9/11 times two.

U.S. military deaths from Iraq and Afghanistan now surpass those of the most devastating terrorist attack in America’s history, the trigger for what came next.

The latest milestone for a country at war came Friday without commemoration. It came without the precision of knowing who was the 2,974th to die in conflict. The terrorist attacks killed 2,973 victims in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania.

An Associated Press count of the U.S. death toll in Iraq rose to 2,696. Combined with 278 U.S. deaths in and around Afghanistan, the 9/11 toll was reached, then topped, the same day. The Pentagon reported Friday the latest death from Iraq, an as-yet unidentified soldier killed a day earlier after his vehicle was hit by a roadside bombing in eastern Baghdad.

Not for the first time, war that was started to answer death has resulted in at least as much death for the country that was first attacked, quite apart from the higher numbers of enemy and civilians killed, too.

What makes this piece so unbelievably disingenuous is that the reporter then takes the next 500 words to tell us why this “milestone” doesn’t matter:

Historians note that this grim accounting is not how the success or failure of warfare is measured, and that the reasons for conflict are broader than what served as the spark.

The body count from World War II was far higher for Allied troops than for the crushed Axis. Americans lost more men in each of a succession of Pacific battles than the 2,390 people who died at Pearl Harbor in the attack that made the U.S. declare war on Japan. The U.S. lost 405,399 in the theaters of World War II.

“There’s never a good war but if the war’s going well and the overall mission remains powerful, these numbers are not what people are focusing on,” said Julian Zelizer, a political historian at Boston University. “If this becomes the subject, then something’s gone wrong.”

Beyond the tribulations of the moment and the now-rampant doubts about the justification and course of the Iraq war, Zelizer said Americans have lost firsthand knowledge of the costs of war that existed keenly up to the 1960s, when people remembered two world wars and Korea, and faced Vietnam.

“A kind of numbness comes from that,” he said. “We’re not that country anymore — more bothered, more nervous. This isn’t a country that’s used to ground wars anymore.”

In fact, the milestone itself was not really the reason for highlighting our war dead. It was to point to the fallacious notion that the war is part of the class struggle:

A new study on the war dead and where they come from suggests that the notion of “rich man’s war, poor man’s fight” has become a little truer over time.

Among the Americans killed in the Iraq war, 34 percent have come from communities reporting the lowest levels of family income. Half have come from middle income communities and only 17 percent from the highest income level.

Even if true, what in God’s name does the economic background of our casualties have to do with anything? Does the reporter truly believe that this is a “Rich Man’s War?”

In order to prove that assumption, one must delve into the conspiracy theories involving Haliburton and the oil companies. Because while you could almost certainly prove that there have been increased profits for large corporations doing business with the government as a result of the war, there is not one scintilla of evidence proving that the reason George Bush went to war in the first place was to personally enrich himself or his Evil Corporate Friends. It is a fantasy that has been pushed by the left for nearly 5 years. The theory makes a titanic mistake in logic and reason by positing the notion that there is no other possible explanation for increased profits for Haliburton except the reason that Bush and Cheney wanted to do themselves and their friends a favor.

It insults the intelligence of thinking people to make such charges – which of course lets out the left and most of the press.

The overt bias inherent in this piece is a disgrace. One can be anti-war without allowing that bias to permeate a story about our honored dead in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Associated Press should either amend the story to make it a study of the economic disparities in Iraq War dead or pull the piece entirely. The highlighting of that “milestone” was gratuitous and without precedent in the history of war reporting.