The number now as I write this is 3475. Or perhaps by the time you read it, it will be 3500 or 3525. It goes up on average approximately one or two digits a day since the count began on March 19, 2003, a totemic figure whose meaning almost anyone knows at a glance. You can track it in the newspapers or on any number of websites, or you can ignore it if you will as one more piece of bad news in a welter of dismal tidings. You may also have seen the figure hand-painted on the back of a white Ford van cruising the streets of Lakewood, a mobile reminder of the human cost of what is shaping up to be a vast misadventure. Or else—depending on your point of view—an irritating statement of partisanship at a time that calls for loyalty.

Lakewood resident Michael Pomerantz has gotten both reactions and everything in between to the count of American dead in Iraq he keeps on the back of his van. On the daily rounds from his home on Summit Avenue to the Metroparks where he walks his dog in the morning, or traveling outside of Lakewood to the art fairs where he shows his painting, the body count attracts attention. He has been hugged by little old ladies, interviewed by Channel Three television news and confronted bitterly in the parking lot of Home Depot on 117th Street. “I’ve gotten a lot of middle fingers,” Michael said. “The first one was from a North Olmstead police officer.”

As the tally has climbed and the situation in Iraq has deteriorated responses to the sign on his van have grown generally more favorable. Michael Pomerantz does not think of himself as an activist; neither does he think of himself as “anti-war,” having supported American ventures in the first Iraqi war, Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia and Afghanistan. But he has opposed the current Iraq venture from the beginning and started displaying the sign three years ago. “As I was watching the numbers reach 500 then 700 and 800, I thought, that’s a lot of people,” he said. “We lost 150 in the first Iraqi war and many people thought it would be the same amount. So I thought, what would be the best way to draw attention to that? Rather than an angry sign with a blatantly political message, I thought, let’s just put the number out there. When I first started displaying the sign people didn’t want to give me the thumbs up because it was like applauding the deaths,” he told me. “Now it’s clear I’m only pointing out one of the many facts indicating what a terrible mistake this war is. I might just as easily have put up the figure of $500 billion.” He was asked if it would it not be hugely irresponsible to leave now, abandoning the Iraqis and the Kurds to the parties of jihad and possibly granting Al Queda a stronghold in an oil rich country. “It would take us probably 18 months to extract ourselves in any case,” Pomerantz answers. “What we need is a plan—to consolidate our forces, turn over the occupation to friendly forces and get out. When you make a mistake you fix it, and if you can’t fix it you at least stop making the same mistake. Military experts say the one thing Iraqis really hate is outsiders, and that the first thing they would do if we pulled out is throw out the rest of the outsiders—the five percent of the insurgents who are actually Al Queda from surrounding countries. The Sunni and Shia would battle it out and come to a truce—which is the way belligerents everywhere share an invented country,” he said. “It might get worse, it might not. But we need to preserve our army to protect us.”

The most striking response Pomerantz says he has received—and a common one—is from supporters of the war who seem to imply the figure is a trivial one, that the country lost that many lives in a month or so during Korea or Vietnam; that death is a cost of any war, and that this one is no different; that many more people die in traffic accidents every year. It is not a sentiment shared by people who have seen the war first hand, at least among those few who have identified themselves to Pomerantz. “The only two Iraqi war veterans I have talked to about the sign have been wholeheartedly in favor of it,” he says. “They were there, and it seems like no one notices. These guys make very little money, are risking everything and they are away from home for a record amount of time.” My own sense is that even those—especially those—who (like me) believe the original mission was valid and who are ambivalent about the consequences of our early departure, yet who remain comfortably at home, ought to miss no chance to remember that men and women in their teens and twenties are dying, and some are coming home without limbs. Regarding the costs of this war, both human and financial, it is the Bush Administration that has reaped a measure of public cynicism for the combination of naiveté and incompetence it seems to have displayed regarding what it would take to win this war—in resources and “boots on the ground”—a war that was fought, in Thomas Friedman’s words, with “just enough troops to lose.” “If you take the administration’s argument that this is the biggest battle of our lives, why did we go over there with fewer soldiers than we used just to liberate the little country of Kuwait?” Pomerantz asks. “Something like 12 million people fought in World War II, what are we doing trying to take over Iraq with a couple thousand troops?”

By opting to frighten the country into war on the basis of intelligence that was less than perfect, rather than persuade it on moral grounds that were and are still valid, the President ensured that when things began to go awry (and the vaunted weapons of mass destruction did not materialize) he would have no credibility left to ask the public to tolerate a bloody war. Add to that the many other disgraces—Abu Graib (for which no one in the Bush Administration was asked to resign), the torture of detainees, the squandering or embezzlement of some 8 billion dollars in aid to Iraq (again with no oversight or accountability), the appointment of inexperienced 20-year olds to oversee the rebuilding of the country (as documented in Peter Galbraith’s “The End of Iraq”) some of whom had nothing more to recommend them than Republican or conservative credentials—all these have compromised the support of people who want to believe that a stable, open democracy in the Middle East is the long-term solution to Islamic terrorism.

Michael Pomerantz does not strike me as a stridently political type. He is a painter of landscapes and residential homes, and when he hands me his business card the small reproduction of his work on the card immediately suggests Edward Hopper, about whom Pomerantz wrote his master’s thesis. This makes sense—with its porched houses and old brick storefronts, Lakewood might have appealed to Hopper’s eye. Pomerantz appears to have both a sense of humor and of the irony of history. He predicts that Bush will not pull out of Iraq (I agree with him there) and that the Republicans will be routed in the next election (not so sure about that) and that eventually American forces will leave.

“And in ten years the revisionists will come back and say it was people like Michael Pomerantz who lost the war,” he says. “I’ve gotten that reaction—`because of you we are losing the war.’ I don’t know how that is exactly, but that’s what they say.”