The results so far: 5 years, 4,298 coalition causualities, $600,000,000,000 spent

March 26, 2003. An Iraqi soldier killed in a firefight with U.S. Marines in central Iraq, north of Nasiriya.
Photo - James Hill for The New York Times.

Good Morning.

Today's headline is a cheap tactic. But with a war that has exceeded all budgets, something from it should come at low cost.

Anniversaries are meant to be celebrated or honored. The Iraq War, outside of the hundreds of thousands of civilian and military lives lost, fits neither.

A lot of folks are wondering aloud, what that $600 billion price tag would have bought here in the states. Health care? Social Security? Education? Whatever your preference, this war has in many ways substituted forward progression in this country. Whoever's next in line has a big pile of shit to clean up.

Ok, ranting aside, here's other coverage with varying degrees of contempt:

• the New York Times - 'Estimates of Iraq War Were Not Close to Ballpark', an insider's perspective in blog form - 'Baghdad Bureau', and a frank, haunting pictorial from James Hill - 'Notes from the Field.'


• icasualities.org - Your one stop shop for senseless military deaths.


• Washington Post - 'Study Claims Iraq's 'Excess' Death Toll Has Reached 655,000'
  

I'll try to update this list throughout the day.