Very true. 2000 casualties is hardly anything, considering the US has been involved in far more costlier battles over shorter time spans (i.e. 7000 Marines in a matter of weeks at Iwo Jima, 12500 in two months at Okinawa), but it's the media coverage that has been primarily responsible for causing American queasiness when it comes to war. Add to that the Baby Boomer generation that seems interested in doing the complete opposite of what the greatest generation of Americans did...
Yeah, damn the media for reporting Vietnam as the cluster **** it really was. And as for the Baby Boomers, it's their amnesia regarding Vietnam that provided a lot of the support for this war.
And now it's the Baby Boomers' nostalgia for Vietnam that's bogging us down. Thirty-eight years ago in Vietnam, the media may have been right in reporting that the government and the military were messing up the war. The US military was still trying to fight the same war that they fought in Korea and WWII, where there was a known, defined enemy with a conventional military. The Communists in Vietnam changed the rules by fighting a guerilla war that the United States wasn't prepared for, and the media made that clear when the Tet Offensive came.
Now the media's doing the same thing with Iraq, even though the military has made good progress with training the Iraqi military and setting up a government voted in by the Iraqi people in a hostile zone. I don't particularly agree with a lot of the reasons that the war was initiated, but I even more disagree with the media and the "peace demonstrators" at home vehemontly criticizing the military, especially when they have neither the time, training, nor ability to determine if the war is winnable or not. I'd be glad to leave that to the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the people trained in strategic thought.
It should be the media's job to report what's happening in the world, not selectively picking what it wants to tell the public and then telling the American people want to think (that goes for both the conservative and liberal media). But yes, that's just my idealistic view of the world taking over again...