So here we have it. A year after going to war in Iraq, things are worse today than when we started. Soldiers are dying daily and civil unrest among the population is escalating. The nation could easily tip into a protracted civil war with our soldiers smack dab in the gunsights of all factions. Tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians have died. And there is no reason to think things are going to get better any time soon.

This quagmire all began because George Bush erroneously claimed that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction and was an immediate threat to the citizens of the United States. We now know for certain that wasn't true - that, in fact, the war was completely unnecessary and irrelevent to American security interests.

Unfortunately, the reckless judgement on the part of the Bush administration has us stuck. We cannot reasonably extricate ourselves, yet we cannot guarantee we will succeed - at least without killing thousands more innocent Iraqi citizens and seeing hundreds more of our own soldiers die. Meanwhile, all Mr. Bush can do is make jokes about not finding any WMDs. And now administation officials are talking about sending over even more troops. We probably have no other choice but to do so.

Its easy to topple cheap and cheesey dictators. But its a lot harder to tame a reluctant population of over 22 million people with but a 134,000 troops. Intelligence analysts predicted this in the days before the war, but their bosses wouldn't listen. So now over 600 Americans have died in pursuit of weapons of mass destruction that did not exist. In the meantime, Mr. Bush has plunged a pathetic little dictatorship into pitiful chaos at a cost of hundreds of billions of dollars to American taxpayers.

Lucky us. At least, lucky us who haven't lost a loved one in some despondent desert south of Baghdad.