Oh, and Bush DID say what followed would be easy and cheap. He said we'd be greeted by cheering crowds and open arms. When the army needed cheering crowds to attend the statue pull-down, they needed to import them from outside Iraq, in the form of Ahmed Chalabi's Free Iraqi Forces (see here ). In the meantime, the welcome our soldiers receive comes in the form of sniping, fragging, and suicide bombs.

As for the cost, before the war, when one of Bush's advisers (Larry Lindsey) released a 200 billion estimate on the cost of the war, he was quickly silenced, and Bush instead went with Mitch Daniels' much lower estimate of about sixty billion total. Now we've spent upwards of a hundred billion (initital cost plus the 87 billion appropriation) in the first year, with no end in sight.