My apology for peace continues. I’ll reiterate my intent – not to single-handedly end the war in Iraq and cast aside all pettiness and ignorance (though it would be nice), but to remind everybody what they are likely to forget when Bush decides Iran is looking at him funny.

There’s something we like about war, and I suspect it is because the last time any war was fought on our soil was in 1941 (Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor), for one day. We certainly like soldiers and the whole warrior mystique. What I don’t think we realize is the cost.

David Leonhardt’s exhaustive Jan. 17 New York Times piece numbers our financial burden in Iraq at $1.2 trillion and climbing every day. He speculates on what else we could have done with such a staggering sum.

I say it doesn’t matter. Money is nothing – literally nothing. It is an imaginary entity that will one day be so much wasted paper. The feds recently made the decision not to change the interest rate and it got nationwide coverage – a man put in charge of managing nothing did nothing, and this is news.

The Iraq war cannot be measured in money – not in a way that means anything to anybody but Halliburton. For those of us who don’t have loved ones or friends serving over in the desert, the Iraq war means only the loss of money, and therefore it means nothing. Nobody who is reading this column right now has the slightest concept of $1.2 trillion.

If you want the cost we’re paying in Iraq, go to http://www.defenselink.mil/news/casualty.pdf. If you’re reading this online, copy it, paste it into your navigation bar, hit enter. Bookmark the page. This is the casualty report for Operation Iraqi Freedom and Operation Enduring Freedom. It is updated with regularity, and the numbers don’t ever go down. If you want to put this war into perspective, go ahead and check it every now and again. As of this writing, there have been more than 3,400 troops killed in action in Iraq, Afghanistan and other countries.

The Department of Defense divides Operation Iraqi Freedom casualties into two categories – “Combat Operations” and “Post-Combat Ops,” the latter meaning deaths that occurred after Bush’s infamous “Mission Accomplished” speech on May 1, 2003.

According to the Department of Defense, only about 140 of the 3,084 soldiers lost in Iraq died during “Combat Operations.” The other 2,900 have all died in “Post Combat Ops.” According to semantics, the fighting there is over, but we’ve still lost 21 times as many troops since it stopped. We’ve been in “Post Combat Ops” for nearly four full years, while “Combat Operations” only lasted about five or six weeks.

It has been apparent from the beginning that Bush doesn’t take this war seriously and it seems the Department of Defense doesn’t either. I wonder how a war widow or an orphaned kid would feel if they looked up this casualty report and saw their husband or their mother or father listed as dying after the fighting was over.

Chances are that you know somebody who knows somebody who died in “Post-Combat Ops.” As the days keep going and more roadside bombs keep blowing up, that likelihood will continue increasing, and you will become less removed.

There are nearly no politicians who have any children fighting in Iraq. They don’t understand the cost, and this is why they’re telling Iraqis to quit complaining and start fixing the mess that we made for them. We’ve got to make them understand that their lack of understanding is going to cost them votes and money – the only things they do understand. We did that this past November in one great voice heard all across the nation – let’s show them it wasn’t a fluke and keep our troops out of another country that doesn’t want or need us.

Kenneth Lowe is the perspective editor for the Northern Star.