I've pondered this recently as many people have made some fairly nasty assumptions about Americans in general. I've read that we have a collective "ADHD", that we are "weak-willed", that we have lost our "manliness" due to feminism, and all sorts of mostly unverified and quite frankly odd theories that tend to attempt to lay more blame than try to find the root of the issue itself.
Clearly this wasn't always the case. We can look back to the American Civil War and see the bloodiest conflict in American history. There were roughly 600,000+ Americans who died in that conflict. The Battle of Shiloh itself was remarkable in the shock that it brought the nation. By itself Shiloh saw more dead than the American Revolution, The War of 1812, and the Mexican-American War combined. It was later topped by other Civil War battles, especially notable is Antietam (which remains the bloodiest single day - 17 September 1862 - in American military history).
Still, the American Civil War could be a notable exception. In fairness it was a true war of brother against brother and divided loyalties. The Great War and World War II would set much different examples as would Korea and Vietnam.
Korea would see 54,000 Americans killed and Vietnam would see another 58,000.
So the question is invariably asked, why do many Americans scoff at the nearly 2900 dead American soldiers in Iraq?
One potential answer, in my opinion, may lie in something that has changed very much on most political parts of the spectrum since the days of Vietnam. Americans, as a general rule, hold individualism in far higher esteem than any concept of the greater good.
Now, before I'm severely attacked, I'm not making a judgement about that statement, I'm just stating it as an observation which I believe to be true and which I believe gives most Americans a strong distaste for war casualties. Historically, if we look at the Vietnam era, there are many ways of viewing that war and its consequences both from a right-wing, centrist, and leftist perspective. Yet, very few of those perspectives defend the antics of the Johnson and Nixon administration to cover up specific details of the war that were released through the Pentagon Papers, My Lai reports, and latter documents.
Moreover, there aren't many people from those perspectives who vehemently defend Richard Nixon's involvement in the Watergate affair. When Reagan came and won office it was with the idea that in many ways "Government was the enemy." Yes, have patriotism and a love for America, but the idea of a sense of allegiance to the state is a pseudo-socialist concept. Bill Clinton came in and offered much the same idea of a limited Federal Government. Plus, leftists in general are wary of nationalism as it occasionally has been used to historically excuse excesses of the state into depriving individual rights.
To be more precise there has recently existed a distaste for the idea of dulce et decorum est pro patria mori even when certain groups rally around the flag and call for support of our troops abroad. The United States general population does not have that sense of Hegelian support of the state above the individual. Moreover, the United States population does not have a sense of the rights of others, non-Americans, above the rights of individual Americans. So with Bosnia and Kosovo, neither popular wars in their own right, they proved succesful by their low casualty figures. With Iraq, the problem is that the casualty figures exist and the war has not been sold to Americans as one of the rights of individual Americans. Americans don't seem to have a pressing concern for the rights of individual Iraqis, or if they do it is not considered a concern of which the American military needs to resolve the issue.
