PUBLIC MARKS with tags iraq & war

War has this nasty habit of being unpredictable. Those who start it invariably do so with optimism, but a full measure of unanticipated heartbreak then accompanies victory, to say nothing of defeat. Even allowing for the inevitability of the unexpected, there cannot have been many wars when the victor was so ill-prepared for triumph as the Americans in Iraq. As George Packer demonstrates in The Assassins' Gate: America in Iraq, his splendid and detailed account of life in Iraq under the occupation, just about every assumption the Bush administration made about the country was wrong.

PORTO ALEGRE, Brazil, Feb 18 (Reuters) - The U.S. Conference for the World Council of Churches condemned the U.S.-led war in Iraq on Saturday for "raining down terror" on helpless Iraqis, and criticized Washington's policies on the environment and poverty. "We lament with special anguish the war in Iraq, launched in deception and violating global norms of justice and human rights," the Conference said in an emotional letter released during the World Council of Churches Assembly in Porto Alegre, Brazil. The World Council of Churches represents Protestant, Anglican, Orthodox and other Christian churches in more than 100 countries. The statement from the U.S. group accused the Bush administration of "raining down terror on the truly vulnerable among our global neighbors," saying the United States "has done much in these years to endanger the human family." It said the U.S. government turned a deaf ear to the voice of the church in the country and in the world, using God's name instead "in national agendas that are nothing short of idolatrous."

Just over three years ago, as the nation readied for war with Iraq, elementary school teacher Deb Mayer stood in front of her class and uttered the word that would get her blacklisted from her profession - 'Peace'

美国花费在伊拉克战争上的费用

The Iraq that exists in President Bush’s imagination and the real Iraq, the one in which 160,000 U.S. troops occupy a nation sliding into civil war, have never seemed further apart.

I'd like to make it clear to the people who run the Democratic Party that I will not support Hillary Clinton for president. Enough. Enough triangulation, calculation and equivocation. Enough clever straddling, enough not offending anyone This is not a Dick Morris election. Sen. Clinton is apparently incapable of taking a clear stand on the war in Iraq, and that alone is enough to disqualify her. Her failure to speak out on Terri Schiavo, not to mention that gross pandering on flag-burning, are just contemptible little dodges.

Did Bush deliberately deceive the American people to justify the war in Iraq? I don't know...and neither do you. But here's what we do know: The president doesn't think we should be asking in the first place. And that might be the biggest scandal of all.

An official assessment drawn up by the US foreign aid agency depicts the security situation in Iraq as dire, amounting to a "social breakdown" in which criminals have "almost free rein".

Literally people have been asking me: "How is it that you were so amazingly prescient about Iraq? Why is it that you were right about everything at precisely the same moment when we were wrong?"

The cost of the Iraq war could top $2 trillion, far above the White House's pre-war projections, when long-term costs such as lifetime health care for thousands of wounded U.S. soldiers are included

The real cost to the United States of the Iraq war is likely to be between $1-trillion and $2-trillion, up to 10 times more than previously thought, according to a report written by a Nobel Prize-winning economist and a Harvard budget expert....