If some people are emphasizing the low rate of casualties, maybe its because so damn many opponents of the war are putting forth the casualties we have been getting as a major reason for surrender and withdrawal. Don pounds on this incessantly, with the obvious intent of showing the casualties as the sole indication of success or failure.

You tell me which side has been racking up the count, keeping score, and marking every statistical milestone. "More people have died since May 1st than died during major combat." So frigging what? Does that mean anything in the strategic sense? Or is it just more of the same "we're losing! We're LOSING!" mantra?

And no, I don't expect gratitude from Iraq, although it would be a pleasant surprised. As history has shown, America get very little credit for anything it does.

From Victor Davis Hanson:

Do not look for the Islamic community here to acknowledge that the United States, in little over a decade, freed Kuwait, saved most of the Bosnians and Kosovars, tried to feed Somalis, urged the Russians not to kill Chechnyans, belatedly ensured that no longer were Shiites and Kurds to be slaughtered in Iraq, spoke out against Kuwait's ethnic cleansing of a third of a million Palestinians — and now is spending $87 billion to make Iraqis free.

That the Arab world would appreciate billions of dollars in past American aid to Jordan, Egypt, and the Palestinian Authority, or thank America for its help in Kuwait and Kosovo, or be grateful to America for freeing Iraq — all this is about as plausible as the idea that Western Europeans would acknowledge their past salvation from Nazism and Soviet Communism, or be grateful for the role the United States plays to promote democracy in Panama, Haiti, the Balkans, or the Middle East.

No, in this depressing age, the real problem is apparently our support for democratic Israel and all those pesky Jews worldwide, who seem to crop up everywhere as sly war makers, grasping film executives, conspiratorial politicians, and greedy colonialists, and thus make life so difficult for the rest of us.