What Do We Know After One Year? It Was Lies

Dana Milbank and Robin Wright on the front page: A year ago tonight, President Bush took the nation to war in Iraq with a grand vision for change in the Middle East and beyond.

The invasion and occupation of Iraq, his administration predicted, would come at little financial cost and would materially improve the lives of Iraqis. Americans would be greeted as liberators, Bush officials predicted, and the toppling of Saddam Hussein would spread peace and democracy throughout the Middle East.

Things have not worked out that way, for the most part.

Bush: "A year ago, Iraq was ruled by the whims of one cruel man."

On April 23, 2003, Andrew S. Natsios, head of the U.S. Agency for International Development, laid out in a televised interview the costs to U.S. taxpayers of rebuilding Iraq. "The American part of this will be $1.7 billion," he said. "We have no plans for any further-on funding for this."

The administration... has said it expects overall Iraqi reconstruction costs to be as much as $75 billion this year alone. The administration has already sought more than $150 billion for the Iraq effort.

A poll of Iraqis released this week by ABC News found that [just] 42 percent of Iraqis, and 33 percent of Arab Iraqis, said the war liberated Iraq... The presence of U.S.-led forces in Iraq is opposed by 51 percent of Iraqis.

With about four months left... there is still no plan for how to pick a new government.

el - I suppose since it is on the front page they edit it more for Washington conventional wisdom. I had problems with things I elipsed and ignored.