It's bothersome to think that one of the reasons for widespread public unhappiness about the Iraq war is that we are not winning. In other words, if the U.S. won the war three months after it started, or if the U.S. were winning today, what percentage of the public would be against the war today? I think we know the answer.

Think back to 1991, when the U.S. last went to war against Iraq. The official reason for that war was to "liberate" the small country of Kuwait, which Saddam Hussein had invaded in August 1990. There were lots of reasons to oppose that war, waged by George W. Bush's father. One reason was that, like this time around, there was evidence that the U.S. was going to war as a first resort, not a last resort. Also, our own government has looked the other way and even actively supported precisely the kind of invasion that Saddam had commandered. There was also evidence in 1991 that our government had misled the public about the reasons for war in Iraq, just like the current war.

There was some opposition to the 1991 war, much of it principled, on the theory that we really declared war in Iraq because of its oil reserves and that we did not really care about the people of Iraq or Kuwait. This opposition stemmed from the undisputed fact that the U.S. government continued supporting Saddam when he gassed his own people, and the first President Bush did not follow through on his promise to help the Kurds rebel against Saddam after the first Gulf War ended, a broken promise that resulted in the deaths of thousands when Saddam retaliated.

No one cared about these nagging factual problems which American society did not debate or even know about, unless you were reading hard-to-find magazines in the pre-Internet era, when you really had to look for this stuff. When the soldiers came home after victory in Iraq, thousands of Americans cheered them on during the victory parades, unaware of the tens of thousands of Iraqis who died during that war and the many more who would die of malnutrition and starvation once our government imposed economic sanctions against Iraq which the U.S. finally lifted once Saddam was deposed in Gulf War II.

The indifference to foreign suffering has surfaced again. Thanks to Tom Tomorrow, a great cartoonist and blogger, I learn that the average American has greatly understated the true costs of the current war in Iraq.

One: when random Americans were polled a few months ago by the Associated Press, the median guess for the death toll was under ten thousand. So there’s a fair chance that however bad you may think Iraq is, you might want to multiply it by one hundred. We are talking about a possible literal megadeath. On our watch.

Two: predictably, the new estimate has already been dismissed out of hand by the Pentagon, as was last year’s Lancet study. But the Lancet study’s methodology is actually widely accepted; even John Zogby said it was “as good as it gets.” And the new poll, conducted by a respected firm whose clients include the Conservative Party, the Bank of Scotland, and Morgan Stanley — not exactly a bunch of raving lefties — is (as Jon notes) simply consistent with the Lancet study.

The death toll in Iraq far exceeds 10,000. It's in the high six figures, possibly even a million people. You can't blame the American people for this. They have no way of knowing how many Iraqis have died since the American invasion in 2003. The media doesn't care, and the public's opposition to the war has almost nothing to do with casualties on the other side,only our side. I wonder if American opposition to the Iraq war is principled, and if public opinion would turn around with a few well-publicized "successes" there?