Midge Decter doesn't get it.

In a piece in Monday's New York Post, Decter juxtaposes the Civil War's massive body count with the triple-digit death toll among Americans in Iraq. Contemporary Americans going wobbly over Iraq, this contrast seems to suggest, shames our ancestors who endured much worse.

And they did, but the Civil War was a contest fought over things worth fighting for--union or independence, freedom or slavery--worth dying for.

What are our young men and women dying for in Iraq? To combat mythic Iraqi connections to 9/11, a barely-existent nuclear weapons program, and weapons of mass destruction that Iraqis couldn't find when their country was invaded (for the same reason that Americans can't find them now that they have overrun Hussein's armies).

Decter contends that "an outcry is being staged--and 'staged' is the word--over casualties amounting to a few hundred" in Iraq. But this outcry isn't "staged." And the anger isn't because "a few hundred" Americans are dead. Americans are dying in pursuit of terrorists in Afghanistan, for instance, but nobody but the lunatic fringe opposes that military action.

The deaths of our soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines will always bother Americans. When those deaths serve vital national interests, we mourn but understand.

Americans are willing to fight and die for things worth fighting and dying for. Abstractions like nation building, righting all the world's wrongs, and imposing Western democracy on a people who either don't want it or aren't ready for it don't meet that basic criterion.

It's why Americans die in Iraq, not simply that they die, that outrages so many Americans.