To put it into perspective,...
...30,000 Iraqi civilian deaths so far would be like something claiming the lives of about 347,000 American civilians (working with 2004 stats from the Encyclopaedia Britannica 2006 Ultimate Reference Suite DVD).
The decade-long Iran-Iraq War, one of the deadliest wars since World War II, claimed considerably more Iraqi lives than Operation Iraqi Freedom, even if the current situation in Iraq continues for a decade.
The Spanish influenza pandemic of 1918-19 took some 550,000 American lives at a time when the US population was about 104 million. On the same scale, such a pandemic today would kill about 1.5 million. (Recent worst-case scenario for a super-flu pandemic: 1.9 million dead.)