I urge you to visit the independent websites that report on events in Iraq. Independent being those not owned by US corporate media, such as CNN, Fox, MSNbc, etc. The independent War and Peace sites are listed on this site and provide daily first-hand updates to what is happening. If you, as an American citizen, want the truth, then you have to compare different reports. It has always been this way - right back to the beginning of newspapers a couple hundred years ago.

Today, Juan Cole provides solid insight into the "huge" firefight of a couple days ago which supposedly killed over 50 "terrorists". Solid questions that are not answered by the media news reports. Questions we should all have.

In Vietnam, the Pentagon claimed for years to be almost ready to win the war. 30 years later we know they knew then that they were losing. We know they lied to us. We know they covered up incidents that they felt did not aid the war effort. In the end, 57,000+ US soldiers died, untold tens of thousands of Vietnamese died and we got chased out of the country. We are now involved in an absolutely no-win situation in the Middle East. Obviously a no-win situation.

Oh - our military said no US deaths in that firefight. Well, one of the "wounded" soldiers has died. How mutilated and wrecked for the rest of their lives are the other wounded? And we have killed an estimated 8,000 plus Iraqis so far. How many does it take? How many did we say Saddam murdered? At what rate for how many years? Our rate is 16,000 Iraqis a year and we are ahead of the rate of US casualties in the Vietnam war.

And do check the Guardian report on Richard Perle admitting the war was illegally started by the US. Many Bellingham lawyers marched in protest to the war for just this reason months ago. Or do a search on Google News for "Perle war illegal" and see what you find. If you become comfortable doing news searches on Google, you can get some great reports dealing with specific questions.