The U.S.war in Iraq is a tragic blunder that is costing lives and money. It is a war of deception and is failing in leadership and accountability.

1. Four years since the U.S. invasion, the mission in Iraq has become a fight against an inexhaustible insurgency emboldened by the U.S. presence.
2. The Iraq war is spending lives. As of April 1, 2008 4,011 U.S. troops have died and over 29,496 have been wounded. On average a thousand innocent Iraqis die each month. Between 151,000 to 665,000 Iraqi civilians have died since the war began four years ago.
3. More than one in four U.S. soldiers come home from Iraq with health problems.
4. The American soldiers and their families bear most of the burden of the war.
5. Every second America stays in Iraq we taxpayers pay $6,300. Several studies suggest the tab could be between $1 to $2 trillion. This does not include the medical and disability costs to American veterans with injuries.
6. President Bush is hobbled by and the rising gas prices and the budget deficit.
7. America is borrowing the money from China and other countries to finance the war. We add $200 billion every year the troops remain in Iraq. The vast sums of money going to Iraq would be better spent rescuing the American health care and school system, developing alternative forms of energy and reducing poverty.
8. Instead of going after Osama bin Laden, al Qaeda, and the Saudi extremist after September 11, 2001 the Bush Administration chose to invade oil rich Iraq, a country that had nothing to do with the U.S attack.
9. Many people believe the Bush Administration invaded Iraq to eliminate the need to continue the The United States-Saudi Arabia Joint Economic Commission (JEOR) with The House of Saud, the rulers of Saudi Arabia.
10. The war on terror is being lost because Al Queda’s real motive for attacking America is about U.S. policies not about hating "democratic freedoms." The policies include America’s unqualified support for Israel, the U.S troops on the Arabian Peninsula, forcing below market prices in Muslim oil, the protection of corrupt Muslin regimes and the occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan.
11. Bush Administration intended to get America into a war with Iraq eight months before the 9/11 attacks. Richard Clark, President Bush’s former top anti-terrorist advisor, Paul O’Neill, the former National Security Council member and the British Downing Street Memo said it was not a question of "why" but "how."
12. Civil war is not inevitable if a good leader offers the Iraqi citizens peace and prosperity. Although the ratio of blacks to whites in South Africa is five to one the world incorrectly predicted a civil war when blacks were allowed to vote and Nelson Mandela, the first black Prime Minister, was elected in 1994.
13. Iraq’s civil war will continue whether our troops withdraw tomorrow or ten years from now.
14. Only about five percent of the terrorists in Iraq are foreign suicide bombers the others are Iraqis. The Sunnis, the former ruling minority that forms 20% of the Iraq population, are the warriors and have the power to maintain violence indefinitely.
15. The proposed Iraq constitution creates autonomous regions for the Kurds and Shi’ites in the oil-rich north and south leaving the Sunnis without natural resources like oil.
16. There were no documented suicide attacks in Iraq before the American invasion in 2003. Only when the U.S. stops using Iraq as a battleground and requires our occupation forces to leave will peace be possible in Iraq. (President Bush said rather there than here.)
17. The Iraqi opposition is sacrificing themselves to defend their country while America is sacrificing its soldiers for oil, which is what the war is about.
18. The war is not winnable militarily.
19. A July 2007 poll shows that seventy-one percent of Americans support the removal of all U.S. troops from Iraq by April 1, 2008.
20. The Bush Administration set a precedent after 227 years to invade a country that had not attacked us first.
21. America dominates the nuclear and military arena because of its 10,000 nuclear warheads and stockpiles of weapons.
22. Both Iraq and America have a history of ethnic cleansing, slavery, civil war and withholding the vote from woman.
23. Democracy in the U.S. is declining as it becomes an increasingly repressive empire in the service of corporate interests.
24. The U.S. Equal Rights Amendment has yet to be ratified by the legislators for voting and inclusion in the Constitution.
25. There was an intelligence failure—the Bush administration failed to learn that Saddam had no weapons of mass destruction.
26. The Bush administration made a mistake not thwarting the Iraqi insurgency at its start.
27. The Iraq invasion failed because the borders were not secured, there were too few U.S. troops and the Iraqi army was disbanded creating 400,000 disgruntled unemployed soldiers and civil servants.
28. More Jihades are recruited than being killed because of insufficient troops, equipment, resources and frequent troop replacement.
29. There is no plausible road map towards stability in Iraq.
30. We don’t have enough intelligence analysts.
31. We have a weak counterinsurgency plan. Experts in counterinsurgency warfare say killing insurgents only increases recruits and alienates civilians. A proven method to gain an intelligence advantage is to protect civilians by providing safe havens with military, economic and political security.
32. The army and marines are stretched to breaking point.
33. There is a failure of leadership and lack of accountability in the U.S. military. As of October 2005 the Army has investigated more than 400 allegation of prisoner abuse, similar to the Abu Ghraib scandal, in Iraq and Afghanistan. More than 230 of its personnel have been court-martialed or received non-judicial punishment.
34. Hurricane Katrina showed Americas rescue capabilities are extremely limited in natural and man-made disasters.
35. The Katrina aftermath exposed how the Bush Administration puts political connections before experience in some top vital government positions and awards contracts to companies with strong ties.
36. Natural disasters were neglected when State and Federal government shifted its money and manpower to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
37. The Federal and local government’s slow response to the Hurricane Karina victims cost lives and showed the need to address America’s poverty, deteriorating infrastructure and environmental degradation.
38. The emphasis on the war in Iraq and terrorism has hurt the Federal Emergency Management Agency FEMA when it was subsumed by the Department of Homeland Security.
39. The U.S. Federal and Local government left half-a-million hurricane victims to fend for themselves for six days in New Orleans in September 2005.
40. America is focused on risk rather than disaster prevention. For example from 2001 to 2005 the Corps asked Congress for $496 million to upgrade and improve levees, drainage and pumping stations in New Orleans. Congress approved only $249.5million—half of what the Corps wanted.
41. Congress approved $62.3 billion in Gulf Coast aid for FEMA. The final tab could top $200 billion.
42. Most of the Jihades are young Saudis who are inflamed by America’s foreign policies and the footage of fighting and prisoner abuse in Iraq.
43. The U.S. economy benefits from the Iraq war as the contracts to rebuild Iraq have been given to U.S. companies such as Bechtel and Halliburton
44. The training of the Iraqi forces is ineffective.
45. The Bush administration should stop fighting the press and Democrats and figure out how to end the war in Iraq.
46. The U.S war in Iraq is a tragic blunder that is costing lives and money. It is a war of deception and is failing in leadership and accountability.
47. The U.S. should apply the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness to all people of the world not just Americans as history shows that communism and terrorism are predictable reactions to oppression and exploitation.