If all anyone ever reported about a military engagement were the casualty figures, then you don't get anything useful about what was attempted and accomplished. Does that figure of 51,983 sailors and Marines killed in WWII say anything about the Battle of Midway, Guadacanal, Tarawa, Iwo Jima, Okinawa, etc. Likewise, simply saying the death toll from Iraq doesn't tell a thing about what has happened there in the past 2 1/2 years, good or bad. It simply diminishes the lives lost to a number without putting their sacriface into any form of context other than political opposition to the war. It cheapens their lives in the most crass and ignorant way possible. I live in a city surrounded by military installations (Ft Carson, Peterson AFB, Schriever AFB, Cheyenne Mountain, and the Air Force Academy). Thousands of military personnel from these bases have served in Iraq and roughly 100 have died. Based on what I've heard, they absolutely despise the "body counters" who refuse to look at what they've accomplished for their sacriface.

I work with the military and the Intel Community on a daily basis, so I sometimes forget that most people don't have a clue as to how they work. The Intel Community is a collection of agencies (CIA, NSA, DIA, NGA, NRO, etc.) that pool their information to arrive at a consensus. It's basically "intel by committee". That information was what was briefed to President Bush (and Clinton before him) that convinced both men that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. Neither president personally created the information - they just based their actions on the information given them. It's an imperfect solution for an imperfect world, but it's the best we have.

Last week, the Chicago Tribune examined the matter in an in-depth article called Judging the case for war. It's a good read that's one of the more balanced pieces of journalism on the subject.

Did President Bush intentionally mislead this nation and its allies into war? Or is it his critics who have misled Americans, recasting history to discredit him and his policies? If your responses are reflexive and self-assured, read on.

On Nov. 20, the Tribune began an inquest: We set out to assess the Bush administration's arguments for war in Iraq. We have weighed each of those nine arguments against the findings of subsequent official investigations by the 9/11 Commission, the Senate Intelligence Committee and others. We predicted that this exercise would distress the smug and self-assured--those who have unquestioningly supported, or opposed, this war.

The matrix below summarizes findings from the resulting nine editorials. We have tried to bring order to a national debate that has flared for almost three years. Our intent was to help Tribune readers judge the case for war--based not on who shouts loudest, but on what actually was said and what happened.

The administration didn't advance its arguments with equal emphasis. Neither, though, did its case rely solely on Iraq's alleged illicit weapons. The other most prominent assertion in administration speeches and presentations was as accurate as the weapons argument was flawed: that Saddam Hussein had rejected 12 years of United Nations demands that he account for his stores of deadly weapons--and also stop exterminating innocents. Evaluating all nine arguments lets each of us decide which ones we now find persuasive or empty, and whether President Bush tried to mislead us.

In measuring risks to this country, the administration relied on the same intelligence agencies, in the U.S. and overseas, that failed to anticipate Sept. 11, 2001. We now know that the White House explained some but not enough of the ambiguities embedded in those agencies' conclusions. By not stressing what wasn't known as much as what was, the White House wound up exaggerating allegations that proved dead wrong.

Those flawed assertions are central to the charge that the president lied. Such accusations, though, can unfairly conflate three issues: the strength of the case Bush argued before the war, his refusal to delay its launch in March 2003 and his administration's failure to better anticipate the chaos that would follow. Those three are important, but not to be confused with one another.

There's much more, but past page 2, you'll need to register to read the rest of the article.