As the calender approached the end of 2006 and the beginning of a new year, America’s military adventure in iraq reached yet another sad milestone:

BAGHDAD, Dec. 31 — The number of U.S. service members killed in Iraq since the war began in 2003 reached 3,000 on Sunday, a symbolic milestone at a time when the Bush administration is rethinking its strategy for the increasingly violent conflict.

As the year drew to a close, the U.S. military announced that a soldier was killed Saturday by a roadside bomb while on patrol in a southeastern neighborhood of Baghdad. Two soldiers were injured in the attack. Their names were not released.

The Defense Department also announced that Spec. Dustin R. Donica, 22, of Spring, Tex., was killed by small-arms fire Thursday in Baghdad.

According to the Associated Press and the independent Web site iCasualties.org, both of which keep counts of war fatalities, the deaths raised the American toll to at least 3,000.

Reaching that threshold has significance at a time when President Bush is considering a change in strategy that could include sending in more troops. The 140,000 U.S. troops currently in Iraq have not been able to reduce the daily violence caused by an aggressive insurgency in the western province of Anbar and an increasingly bitter sectarian conflict in Baghdad.

“What you see is the U.S. deeply involved in this fight against an insurrection and increasingly trying to bring order to a low-level civil war,” Anthony H. Cordesman, an analyst for the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said by telephone in Washington. “There’s no way you can do that with 140,000 troops in a country of 27 million without having casualties.”

He added: “This pace of casualties is likely to go on until we can change or find a new approach.”

As we honor the memory of these two men, and those who preceded them, the time has come, I think, to question what they are doing there in the first place.

America went into Iraq with two goals. The first, the one that the Bush Administration advanced to the public as the reason we needed to go immediately, was the threat of weapons of mass destruction. As it turned out, the intelligence on Iraq’s WMD program was completely wrong. Saddam’s WMD capabilities were nowhere near what we thought they were. The second, unstated, goal, was to depose Saddam Hussein. Something that, quite arguably, should have been done at the end of the Persian Gulf War in 1991. This second goal, though, required that we not only depose Saddam but that we have a plan in place for what would come after him.

The United States military carried out its first goal relatively flawlessly. Some would argue that we should have committed more troops to the initial invasion in order to ensure that weapons and Baath party supporters couldn’t sneak across the border to Syria, from which they later launched the insurgency we are dealing with today. Nonetheless, the three week war in Iraq was, by all measures, a complete success.

The failure came after the war ended. It is clear now that there was no plan for victory and that the lack of a coherent policy helped created the conditions that brought the insurgency, and current civil war, into being.

So far, only one man, Donald Rumsfeld, has been called to account for the mistakes that were made. As a new year begins, perhaps it’s time to not only create a new plan, but ask why we didn’t have one to begin with.