Five Years

Next week we'll mark five years of fun and adventure in Iraq. Half a decade wasted on a really bad idea, with no signs of improvement. Real soldiers are still dying:

Guerrillas fired rockets at a US base south of Baghdad on Wednesday, killing 3 US soldiers and wounding 2. An Iraqi civilian was also wounded.

A US soldier was killed and another wounded at Diwaniya on Tuesday by a roadside bomb (that is Shiite territory). So the death toll for Monday through Wednesday was fifteen US troops killed.

If you’re reading these words, you are better informed about US casualties in Iraq than most Americans, for whom it has become a forgotten war. If it is not on television, it does not exist.

http://www.juancole.com/

And here's a brief reminder that this war was started based on lies:

ABC News has requested and obtained a copy of the Pentagon study which shows Saddam Hussein had no links to Al Qaeda.

(READ THE FULL REPORT HERE.)

It's government report the White House didn't want you to read: yesterday the Pentagon canceled plans to send out a press release announcing the report's availability and didn't make the report available via email or online.

Based on the analysis of some 600,000 official Iraqi documents seized by US forces after the invasion and thousands of hours of interrogations of former officials in Saddam's government now in US custody, the government report is the first official acknowledgment from the US military that there is no evidence Saddam had ties to al Qaeda.

The Bush administration apparently didn't want the study to get any attention. The report was to be posted on the Joint Forces Command website yesterday, followed by a background briefing with the authors. No more. The report was made available to those who asked for it, and was sent via overnight mail from Joint Forces Command in Norfolk, Virginia.

Asked yesterday why the report would not be posted online and could not be emailed, the spokesman for Joint Forces Command said: "We're making the report available to anyone who wishes to have it, and we'll send it out via CD in the mail."

Another Pentagon official said initial press reports on the study made it "too politically sensitive."

http://blogs.abcnews.com/rapidreport/2008/03/report-shows-no.html

It's easy to understand why the administration wouldn't want the public to be reminded that Saddam had no ties to al Qaeda. What's harder for me to understand is how they keep getting away with it.

I haven't posted much lately in part due to my frustration. I wish I could be "live blogging" impeachment hearings.