Americans think Iraq death toll too high; AP wonders why

An AP article by Jeff Donn says Americans consider the death toll in Iraq too high and seems mystified by this sentiment:

The country largely kept the faith during World War II, even as about 400,000 U.S. forces died — 20,000 just in the monthlong Battle of the Bulge. Before turning against the wars in Korea and Vietnam, Americans tolerated thousands more deaths than in Iraq.

Has something changed? Do Americans somehow place higher value on the lives of their soldiers now? Do they expect success at lower cost? Or do most simply dismiss this particular war as the wrong one — hard to understand and harder to win — and so not worth the losses?

Is he serious? This is like the parent who whips a kid throughout childhood then says "Where did I go wrong?" when the kid grows up to be a violent criminal. The media has been alternating between whipping us with the casualty count belt and whacking us with the wrong war paddle for nearly four years now. It's a wonder we're not all out torturing our neighbor's cat.

The article cites confusion over our goals as one reason for the lack of support:

"When is it going to stop? We're losing a lot of youngsters," says former tanker Ed Collins, 82, of Hicksville, N.Y., who survived the assault on Normandy's beaches in World War II. "I went in when I was 18; that was young, too. But we fought for something. Now we have no idea who we're fighting for and what we're fighting for."

That's partly because the mission's focus has shifted repeatedly, the experts argue: from finding weapons of mass destruction, to deposing Saddam Hussein, to fighting terrorists.

Mr. Collins has no idea who and what we're fighting for because he's been paying too much attention to antique media outlets like the AP, and AP says silly things like "the mission's focus has shifted repeatedly". It hasn't. The focus, from the start, has been to depose Saddam Hussein. Weapons of Mass Destruction was just one of the many reasons for doing so.

But the mainstream media, never a fan of George Bush in the first place, has done everything they could to convince us that Bush was wrong to invade Iraq. Having failed to prevent his re-election in 2004, they're going for the consolation prize of ensuring the journalistic record, if not reality, shows that he was the Worst President Ever™.

As part of the media's "Worst President Ever" campaign, we're periodically hit with the "grim milestone" bomb. A "grim milestone" is whenever the casualty count crosses some multiple of 1,000 as it just did the other day. But over the past week, the media ghouls got a bonus when the casualty ticker crossed another "grim milestone" matching the number of Americans killed on 9/11. How much you wanna bet the legacy media has already drafted up the stories for the next "grim milestone" of 4,000?

Searching Yahoo News just now for "grim milestone" turns up 670 hits. If I'd secured the rights to that term before the war, I'd be able to retire off the royalties.