Yup, just like Viet Nam. I'm very concerned about the guerillas operating out of all that triple canopy jungle to the west of the Euphrates.

Actually, deaths are declining enough to draw on a graph. Check it out, though the samples are necessarily small. (An SAM up a troop transport's tailpipe might cause a drastic spike on that graph) Which raises another point - at the height of US involvement in the Vietnam war there were 500 US deaths in theater, per week. We are not currently at that level.

Nor, I suspect, will we be. Iraq is a crummy place to fight a guerilla war...

...if you're a guerilla. There is no heavy foliage cover, good weather 9 out of 12 months, and no mountains worth speaking of except the northernmost area, which is very friendly to US forces.

Don, I understand that you're concerned about Our Boys, and I also understand that you've critical of the manner in which the war is being conducted.

The problem, from my perspective, is that I see with many of the people who don't like Bush criticizing our successes. What I see as failures, the anti-Bush faction doesn't see at all.

It's frightening. We're gonna get pounded by al Qaeda again because of the half-assed way Bush is conducting the war. But the Democrats and the press are jumping on him for irrelevant crap.