Here’s Ralph Peters, on the approaching media barrage of “grim milestone” reports: Exploiting the Dead. (Hat tip: Blackacre.)

WE’LL soon reach a total of 2,000 dead American troops in Iraq. You won’t miss the day it happens. The media will pound it into you.

But no one will tell you what that number really means — and what it doesn’t.

Unable to convince the Bush administration or our troops to cut and run, the American left is waging its campaign of support for Islamist terror through our all-too-cooperative media. And you’re the duck in the anti-war movement’s shooting gallery.

Breathless anchors and voice-of-God columnists will suggest that 2,000 dead is an exorbitant price to pay in wartime, that reaching such a threshold means we’ve failed and that it’s time to “support our troops and bring them home.”

All lies. Certainly, the life of every American service member matters to us. But the left’s attempt to exploit dead soldiers and Marines for partisan purposes is worse than grave-robbing: Ghouls only take gold rings and decaying flesh; the left wants to rob our war dead of their sacrifices and their achievements, their honor and their pride.

And right on cue, we have the San Francisco Chronicle: U.S. death toll in Iraq nears 2,000 / Some expect momentum to grow for withdrawal of U.S. troops. (Hat tip: RaiderDan.)

Washington — It’s a grim milestone that no one wants to see come about, but the United States is nearing 2,000 military deaths in Iraq.