"What HAS changed is that these casualty counts have accumulated over time, and a war that was going on for 1.5 years in 2004 is now going on for 3.5 years -- with no real change in prospects readily apparent to people on BOTH sides of the issue."
This is exactly the opinion that the media has been grooming in the minds of the gullible electorate.(including you) The only thing missing is someone tossing their medals over the whitehouse fence.
It worked, they won the election for the democrats.
If we insist on perpetuating this nonsense, the 2008 election is going to go down the sh!tter for the GOP, too.
The "statistical" side of our casualty figures are only the surface of what's really happening here. What's driving so much of the discontent about this war is that a substantial number of the troops in Iraq are not "regular" military but are National Guard and Reserve forces instead. The disruption this causes in the lives of ordinary Americans -- along with the multiple military funerals in specific geographic areas whenever a single unit in Iraq is hit particularly hard -- is starting to wear them down.
Now, you might suggest -- and rightly so -- that these Americans are "tougher than most" and are willing to sacrifice and "stay the course" in Iraq for a long time. But that number declines constantly under duress, and not because people themselves are any less tough, patriotic, etc. than they used to be. I bet a lot of them have simply looked around at all the illegal immigrants who pour across our southern border (with the complicity of our own government, by the way), at all the leftists who show up at anti-war demonstrations in their SUVs and Volvos in between trips to Starbucks, and are asking themselves: "What's the f#%&ing point of all this?"