I've neglected to talk about Bush's War given the excitement of the presidential race, but it's still going on. And people are still dying.
Yesterday alone, at least six soldiers were killed in attacks.
A U.S. soldier died Sunday of wounds suffered in a grenade attack on his Bradley vehicle that was patrolling a central Iraqi town of Beiji the day before, said Maj. Josslyn Aberle, a spokeswoman for the 4th Infantry Division.
Five other U.S. soldiers were killed in separate bombings and a blast that narrowly missed an American convoy killed four Iraqis and wounded about 40 others in a bloody day of attacks on Saturday.
The deaths raised to 513 the number of U.S. service members who have died since the United States and its allies launched the Iraq war March 20. Most of the deaths have occurred since President Bush declared an end to active combat May 1.
A helicopter was downed two days ago, and another has crashed today (no casualty reports yet). Meanwhile, at least three massive blasts have been reported in central Baghdad near or in the Green Zone.
609 allied troops have died thanks to Bush's folly, and that of the world leaders that misguidedly follow his lead.
And lest it get lost in the shuffle, all this death and destruction was unecessary. The administration's point man on the WMD search has explicitly stated there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
The former top U.S. weapons inspector in Iraq said Sunday he believes Saddam Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction before the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq.
David Kay said the challenge for the United States now is to figure out why intelligence indicated that the Iraqi president did have them.
"We led this search to find the truth, not to find the weapons. The fact that we found so far the weapons do not exist, we've got to deal with that difference and understand why," Kay said Sunday on the National Public Radio program "Weekend Edition."
Asked whether he feels President Bush owes the American people an apology for starting the war on the basis of apparently flawed intelligence, Kay said: "I actually think the intelligence community owes the president rather than the president owing the American people.
Problem is, the intelligence community did tell Bush that Iraq posed no threat. That is why Cheney and Rumsfeld set up their own intelligence operation inside the Pentagon to make an end-run against an uncooperative CIA. Because the CIA wouldn't give Bush the rationale for war he seeked. So they made shit up, and now they're trying to pin it on the intelligence community.
Bush lied, people died. Or, in the alternative, Bush is an incompetent moron, and people died.
Either way, upwards of 600 US and allied soldiers and countless others have died.