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Dunno why FR no longer allows me to post the entire column. Balance below in reply....

Maybe because you're setting up a straw man. Biased or not, the media is correct. However, for one to defend the war saying essentially, 'it's not even as bad as the civil war' is illogical. What foreign soil was the civil war fought on? What country were we fighting against? Who were the good guys and who were the bad guys? What were 'we' fighting about? I think there are much better analogies one could make than using the civil war in the defense of the Iraq offensive.

War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things. The decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling, which thinks that nothing is worth war, is much worse. The person who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself. - John Stuart Mill ~ (1868)

You missed the entire point of the article. The War on Terror is the LEAST bloody war in all of American history. That is less than ALL wars, not just the Civil War.

As the figures plainly show, the Civil War was our MOST bloody war. This is true of all casualties on both sides. But it is STILL true if you look at only the Union casualties.

Far from setting up a "straw man," I state the plain unvarnished facts. You may disagree with them, but you cannot deny them.

John / Billybob

That is right, Vietnam is not the good compareson.

But Afghanistan, what it was to the Soviets...

Is that so crasy?

The arabs never been great fans of the US, that is no secret.
They also learned in the past 50 years that their chance against the US with traditional warfare is like the trojan horse would have on the Epson derby.

But Iraq come to them as the golden opportunity.
A nation used to live under little comfort and developed great souspison against the US.
Saddam trained its militia on guerilla warfare, but suprisingly they did not meant mutch resistance during the weeks of the war.
After the war finished officially, the resistance increased the pressure, with the help of countless "foreigners" from the neighbouring arab countries, who wants to see the US fail in Iraq.
It looks like there are no shortage of explosives for the IED-s. The daily average of 25 attacs a day needs a lot of "improvisation" in a year, not to mention the explosives.
Now the half of the 200.000 police prooved to be useless for the coalition, but they have american training and they know the methods how to to fight against the insurgents, and no doubts they will pass the info to them.
There are reports of food shortages in areas, because the supply routes not completly controlled by the coalition.
That is true, they do not want the power to given to the Iraqi people... They want the US to stay and spend their citizens tax-money on extra security, bribes, and somtimes importing oil to Iraq...

For more than a year, Bin Laden - under constant siege - does not seem to have much problem giving orders and inspirations to his fanatic islam followers, who's camp seems to grow by the day.

So in short, a low level resistance with outside help slowly isolate the US then increase the cost of the war to a level it have to choose different methods to "protect its interests"...

I just wonder what cost the US willing to pay for removing a cruel dictator...

After reading your article & some posts in this thread, I finally get it. Your headline is more than a catch, to pull the reader into the rest of your article. It speaks volumes. It pretty much says it all.

For people dragging their butts out to march against war, the motivations are the same. Some are against any war. For most of the rest, for the "anti-establishment" crowd, no doubt about it, it's just like Viet Nam. Seeing the tired old coot Kennedy trying to scramble for power... Yes indeedy, we got the whole cast of characters back again.

Back then the bourgeois were called the "silent majority", with a heavy accent on silent. With the net & talk radio, the silent isn't quite so silent this time around.

Back to the point of the body of your article, if any of the early wars on your list of wars had to stand up against a 24/7 media extravaganza, with colored pictures of the dead & injured brought into people's homes, I truly wonder if we would have had the will to fight to win any one of them.