Iraq: 5 years and counting

At least 3,990 members of the U.S. military have died since the beginning of the war in 2003. It has cost taxpayers about $500 billion and estimates of the final tab run far higher. Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph E. Stiglitz and Harvard University public finance expert Linda Bilmes have estimated the eventual cost at $3 trillion when all the expenses, including long-term care for veterans, are calculated.



Senseless and totally unnecessary, this colossal waste of lives and resources is President Bush's lasting legacy. To think of all the good that may have been accomplished within our own borders with countless infrastructure improvements which could have been made, makes me sick to my stomach. And we must consider the lives of our brave servicemen and women, lives lost and others forever changed by the horrors of war with the physical and emotional scars the survivors bring home, which sadden caring, thoughtful people across our country.



And the President never retreats from his premise that we are better off because of this war, with an ever-changing rationale. Let's pray that our next commander in chief brings an end to this atrocity.

Was the war worth it? Was the war worth the billions of dollars and thousands of lives wasted? I guess if you own stock in Halliburton it was. Gas prices through the roof, our own economy in shambles. We took out the existing power structure in Iraq and left a vacuum which still largely exists. This is Bush and Cheney's war and their sad legacy. And the violence continues, and we as Americans lose.