To try and normalize a comparison, that's about twice as many as were killed during "major combat" in the Iraq War, so one might say that this war is going "better".

Again, one has to be careful. I still do not accept the premise that one gauges the primary success of a military effort by how few people are killed or hurt on either side. One can obviously consider a battle in which most of your own soldiers are killed to be a bad one, but the concept of "Pyhrric victory" is still a valid one in military combat.

It's how things are going in the occupation that's bothering a lot of people. We were sold a rosy scenario of jubilant Iraqis lining the roads and cheering their American liberators, the wolf lying down with the lamb, the Age of Aquarius dawning in the Middle East, etc. etc. etc. Hasn't turned out that way, and a lot of people feel they were sold a bill of goods by an Administration with its heart set on war.

Talk to soldiers. Talk to the people who are there. Not the media holed up in Baghdad. There were a lot of Iraqis cheering us into Iraq. I've seen the pictures, and read what the soldiers have written. There are even now many Iraqis happy to see the soldiers and those rebuilding the country. As for the rest of your sentence, if you can find a single administration quote to the effect that everything would be a piece of cake after May 1, please link to it. I can find a lot of quotes that say the opposite.

Think about it. In an essentially conquered nation of twenty million people, about 5,000 are shooting at us. This has to say something for how well we are doing in winning hearts and minds.

The idea that there could have been or should have been a foolproof plan before the invasion of Iraq for the occupation is getting a little tiresome. As you say in this post, the occupation of Iraq is without a valid precedent, and, as with most battle plans, it seems unlikely that anyone would have come up with something that would have survived the first contact with reality. I think we are making progress, changing tactics as necessary. One would think being able to adapt to new conditions would be considered a plus, rather than blindly ignoring what's going on and continuing onward. The cries of "failure" and "quagmire" seem unrelated to any actual analysis of progress in rebuilding the country.

I'd say that there's a minimum price to pay for conquering another country, and you can pay it in combat, or you can pay it in occupation, but one way or another, you pay it. TANSTAAFL.

This is a very good insight. I think we all know that simply destroying Iraq would have resulted in few if any American casualties, and we are paying in lives for taking the more humanitarian approach. We did not follow and massacre fleeing troops. We did not obliterate cities containing hostiles. We don't shoot back when shot at from civilian areas...at least not until recently. We are making every effort not to antagonize the populace. And we get no credit for this.

I don't know that anybody's going to find much fodder for argument, but it'll help understand the massive challenge that Bush has gotten us into.

Again, the idea that Bush told us this would be easy is an invention of the media and antiwar groups. Nobody ever said this would be anything other than a massive challenge. Nobody has ever done what we are trying to do in Iraq in exactly this fashion.

Perhaps the parallels between Iraq and Japan are not exact. But we occupied Japan--a nation where they were NOT shooting at us continuously--for seven years before we gave them their country back. It is ludicrous to assume we are failing in the democratization of Iraq after seven short months, yet somehow this is considered a "quagmire" by many.