"But you have to make a decision: how many American lives is our moral high ground worth?

This is not a facetious question. It may have a real and valid answer in terms of a number, especially in regards to military personnel.

It can already be shown that we have lost many military lives by avoiding tactics available to us that would have saved American lives at the cost of innocent Iraqi lives. This comes under the same category."

I *believe* you are making errors based on false assumptions and faulty premises.
Could the miltary have employed tactics which would have resulted to lower losses to miltary personnel and achieved the result we wanted in Iraq? You assume we could and you think you know what these tactics would have been. I don't think it's wise to make these assumptions. There is no doubt that it could have been possible, but I don't think that the general idea of using overwhelming miltary power- in the form of more soldiers on the ground and/or the tactic of completely flatten some miltary objective through the use of enormous firepower, would have neccessarily have achieved this result.
Instead I believe that the miltary action we have taken has been extremely successful- in terms of losses of miltary personnel and other factors which measure success. There is no doubt that we could learn from the various mistakes and successes of the Iraq campaign. But the lessons learned could include that even smaller forces and less overwhelming firepower [to flatten a town] might be the lesson learned. Example, currently only a small percentage of Iraqi have actually encountered Coalition forces. It *might* have been even better if an even lower percentage of Iraqi had actually encountered Coalition forces.
Of course, all conflicts are different, so a miltary must adapt to different environments and changing conditions- in the next conflict it could be possible that the use [or mere threat] of overwhelming forces could result in much lower losses of both sides.