I wonder how "2500" will affect The Decider's "baby bounce" in the polls?

http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=578&u=/nm/20060615/ts_nm/iraq_dc_31

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - The number of U.S. military deaths in Iraq has reached 2,500, the Pentagon said on Thursday, more than three years into a conflict that finds U.S.-led forces locked in a struggle with a resilient Sunni Arab insurgency. The news came after a senior Iraqi official in Baghdad said his country's security forces had seized al Qaeda in Iraq documents giving key information about the militant group's network and the whereabouts of its leaders.

"We believe this is the beginning of the end of al Qaeda in Iraq," national security adviser Mowaffaq al-Rubaie told a televised news conference in the Iraqi capital.

In Washington, the Pentagon also said 18,490 U.S. troops had been wounded in the war, which began in March 2003 with a U.S.-led invasion to topple President Saddam Hussein. Tens of thousands of Iraqis have been killed.

Rubaie told Reuters earlier this year the insurgency against the U.S.-backed, Shi'ite-led government had been defeated. But violence has continued to rage across Iraq, killing hundreds of people and showing no signs of abating. Iraqi and U.S. officials have also in the past said al Qaeda, blamed for some of the bloodiest attacks in Iraq in the last three years, was on the defensive.





Tourists walk hand-in-hand towards the White House, around a mock coffin representing a dead U.S. soldier left there by anti-war protesters in Washington, June 14, 2006. (Jason Reed/Reuters)