More on Iraq War casualties

Jeff Donn of the Associated Press has a surprisingly interesting analytical piece on why we feel the 3000 casualties suffered in Iraq is a large number, despite it being miniscule in historical terms. See U.S. Toll in Iraq Lower Than Past Wars. This part, in particular, caught my eye:

Polling analysts believe Americans are more sensitive to casualties than in the past because they neither see vital interests at stake nor feel the "halo effect" from a clear prospect of success.

"When is it going to stop? We're losing a lot of youngsters," says former tanker Ed Collins, 82, of Hicksville, N.Y., who survived the assault on Normandy's beaches in World War II. "I went in when I was 18; that was young, too. But we fought for something. Now we have no idea who we're fighting for and what we're fighting for."
That's partly because the mission's focus has shifted repeatedly, the experts argue: from finding weapons of mass destruction, to deposing Saddam Hussein, to fighting terrorists.

When the number of Americans lost in Iraq recently passed the 2,973 killed in the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the parallel was noted by some. Some have also noted that Iraqi deaths far surpass those of the American military, with tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians killed in the violence.

Building a stable democracy in Iraq has been given as a justification for the war's sacrifices, and yet close to two-thirds of Americans think a stable, democratic government is unlikely to take hold in Iraq, according to a Dec. 8 poll by AP-Ipsos. Many believe Iraq has fallen into the chaos of civil war.

Americans instead tend to back wars to stop aggression, like the invasion of Kuwait before the first war with Iraq in 1991, polling indicates. "If the public really believed that our war in Iraq now was about stopping aggression, stopping terrorism, then we would see a greater degree of tolerance for casualties," says Bruce Jentleson, a former policy planner in President Clinton's State Department who now teaches at Duke University.

That makes sense. But this part doesn't:

America's young no longer feel personally threatened, either. The military draft is history. These days, mostly working-class teenagers volunteer to do the fighting.

Charles Moskos, a sociologist at Northwestern University, believes America has lost zeal for warfare because the children of its elite rarely serve. The all-volunteer military is one of many legacies of Vietnam today.

Bobby Blair, a Vietnam veteran from Holliston, Mass., recently spoke about Iraq to a church youth group. "None of them personally know of anyone who's in Iraq," he said. "They didn't realize how serious it was. I said, 'Do you think we're watching a video game?' And some of them said it was almost that."

Greater wealth and smaller families make Americans even more protective of their children and more loath to send them into battle than they once were, some argue. They are "sort of hothouse kids," says Harvey Sapolsky, the retired head of security studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who notes, "My grandparents had seven kids, my parents had two."

If America's young and elite no longer feel threatened by war, then you have to ask why they care at all about so few casualties. You'd think it would go the other way -- because they aren't threatened and don't know anybody in the military, the cost of the war would be far more acceptable.

I think the answer lies with the foggy and changing explanation for the war, rather than some kind of "hothouse kids" phenomenon. After all, there were expectations of much higher casualties in Afghanistan, and most of America was not willing to shy away from that fight.