From what I can tell, it seems that Sandwich is using the US troops death rate vis-a-vis the Washington DC total murder rate, so that'd be ruling out the 30-odd thousand Iraqis killed over that period (quite a decent percentage of whom IIRC will have been killed by gunfire rather than, say, beheading or bombs). I guess if the US was actually fighting someone (well, not someone now, so much as a bunch of small groups of varying degrees of insanity) who was a genuine threat to the country, then there'd be a lot more tolerance of casualties. But when you plonk a bunch of troops - and cash - into somewhere like Iraq, with no actual good reason or benefit for doing so (like **** the Iraqis will want the planned US military bases in that area, or be quite so willing to give oil discounts), and then get stuck into a predictable and blatantly inevitable quagmire of civillian death (which is exactly what was suppossed to be avoided), then there doesn't seem to be all that much value gained in return for the lives of US troops. And we all know 1 US troop is worth ooh, 10 or 20 of those funny skinned foreigners when it comes to the media coverage.
