I'm of the school of thought that the omnipresent power of modern media makes it nigh impossible for a Western Democracy to sustain losses like that without A Very Good Reason. Americans wanted to fight the Communists, for much of the country it was indeed the burden of a long twilight struggle. Nurse Nayirah isn't gonna cut it if we're talking 30,000 dead. We've already established in this thread that you basically need the military to shit the bed to reach that number. Limiting things to a few weeks obviously doesn't give anti-war movements a chance to gain momentum but heads are still gonna roll in Washington.