A "Hundred Years' War" (or longer) for the 21st Century

Center for American Progress devoted today's Progress Report to John McCain's comments to MoJo that it would be fine for U.S. troops to spend the next 100, 1,000, or 1,000,000 years in Iraq, suggesting that the problem in the current conflict is not U.S. presence per se, but the number of U.S. casualties. (I'm trying to imagine an Iraqi SOFA for the next 1,000,000 years.)
Such a stance neatly avoids the criticism of plans for withdrawal from Iraq that such a strategy will allow insurgents to wait for the departure of U.S. troops before unleashing more violence in the war-torn country, but it also presumes that the U.S. can eventually effect a reduction in troop casualties. With 901 U.S. troop casualties in 2007, the highest of any calendar year in the occupation so far, I cannot imagine a situational change in Iraq sufficiently dramatic and soon that would reduce troop casualties and sway public opinion, which currently supports the withdrawal of troops from Iraq within the next two years. This is to say nothing of Iraqi civilian casualties: Iraq Body Count (IBC) estimates that 22,586 to 24,159 were killed in the conflict in 2007. Perhaps McCain doesn't value Iraqis quite as much as U.S. troops; maybe he would support a revival of the Three-fifths Rule for body counts. That way, he could report that only 48,704 civilians have died since the beginning of the occupation. (For those of you with out a calculator handy, IBC estimates the actual number to be somewhere between 81,174 and 88,585.)