Losing Iraq?

Two concessions:
1) Every human life is sacred. We owe our fallen soldiers respect and gratitude, and we our their families our support.
2) I have no idea how reliable the Federation of American Scientists is as a source.

Nevertheless, the next time someone tells you that 3000 casualties means we are losing the war in Iraq, you might want to direct them to pages five and six of the following report on American casualties in all of its wars:
http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/natsec/RL32492.pdf

If the loss of 3000 valiant lives is a complete military failure, then there have been very few wars for which we could claim any sort of victory.

Comments

[Thomas]

Agreed, but I think that the thing that explains where they are coming from is proportionality.

Stopping Hitler, for instance, was such a big thing that even heavy losses could be acceptably proportional. On the other hand, for those who consider the benefit of the Iraq conflict to be all but zero or outright nonexistent, then even comparatively few casualties would be enough to evaluate it as an overall loss.

[PeterTerp]

I agree with the logic there, but my more cynical political side has a hard time thinking it accurately describes the situation. I don't often hear anti-war sentiments that suggest there would be no benefit to a free, democratic Iraq. Rather, the anti-war arguments are usually that it is an unwinnable war.
That being said, there is an article on Townhall.com that suggests you can measure our success in Iraq by the number of headlines dealing with Anna Nicole Smith:http://townhall.com/columnists/PatrickRuffini/2007/02/24/shhhh_the_surge_is_working
According to that columnist, news outlets typically only report on Iraq when something goes wrong; they don't cover our successes.