Since the start of the war in Iraq four months ago, 212 American soldiers have been killed, including 79 who have died since May 1, when President George Bush declared an end to major hostilities in Iraq. It's unclear how many Iraqi civilians perished during major combat, but estimates say it is "several thousand."
The Iraqis did not welcome U.S. soldiers with bouquets of flowers, as the hawks in the White House suggested. Instead, they are begging us to leave and are engaging soldiers in guerrilla warfare. Iraq is in such disarray that experts predict it will take at least 10 years to rebuild the country's infrastructure at a cost of tens of billions of dollars. More importantly though, to date, no weapons of mass destruction have been found and there isn't a shred of proof that Iraq was building a nuclear weapons arsenal.
Still, Bush said Iraq was an imminent threat to its neighbors in the Middle East and to the United States. But how can that be if the evidence of its chemical, biological and nuclear weapons program are nowhere to be found? How then can these casualties be justified?
