Smoking Signposts to Nowhere by Tom Engelhardt and Mark Danner

Consider the strong warning put forward in a recently released British Cabinet document dated two days before the Downing Street memo (and eight months before the war), that "the military occupation of Iraq could lead to a protracted and costly nation-building exercise." On this point, as the British document prophetically observes, "US military plans are virtually silent." So too were America's leaders, and we live with the consequences of that silence. As support for the war collapses, the cost will become clear: for most citizens, 1,700 American dead later – tens of thousands of Iraqi dead later – the war's beginning remains as murky and indistinct as its ending.