WORLD NEWS: "US claims Iraq milestone after month with no fatalities," by Michael Hastings, Financial Times, 2-3 January 2010.

THE YEAR IN BRIEFING: "#3| Afghanistan: A Looming Quagmire?" by Adam Ferguson, Time, 28 December 2009-4 January 2010.

Essential truth I've been stating going back to before PNM: when casualties get really low, the "controversy" over overseas interventions disappears. Few call them occupations, much less wars. Instead, they become "stationing"--as in, we've keep troops stationed in Germany and Japan.

Naturally, all our fears and hopes shift to Afghanistan, where the MSM unimaginatively retreads all the "quagmire" arguments from Vietnam-cum-Somalia-cum-Iraq.

When will the "quagmire" in Afghanistan end? When the casualties get low enough that the "war" drops below the media's--and the public's--radar relative to other things we fear more.

What do you call a war without enough U.S. casualties? You can it a contingency operation--or normal business for the U.S. military stretching back two solid decades.