While I was posting the previous message, a number of counters notched the 1,000th American casualty in Iraq, and some say that this number was actually reached a few weeks ago. It depends on whether you also count reporters and contractors and a few other "miscellaneous" folks. I don't think the exact number is the issue. I mean, it doesn't leap from Small Tragedy to Big Tragedy when you go from 999 to 1,000. The point is that there's a human cost that is often overlooked. One of the reasons that Michael Moore's film had such an impact on some people is that he devoted an awful lot of it to the simple issue of American soldiers and innocent civilians dying as a result of the U.S. military actions.
And yes, there were innocent civilians dying aplenty in Iraq before the U.S. ousted Saddam Hussein and it may have been manipulative of Moore not to focus a bit on that. But if you put the question to most American voters of how many of our soldiers' lives they'd sacrifice to help the Iraqi people, I suspect the average answer would still be pretty far short of a thousand.