Iraq

"Every president deceives. But each has his own style of deceit," writes Joshua Micah Marshall. The Bush administration, he says, specializes in "a particular form of deception: The confidently expressed, but currently undisprovable assertion. ... Many of the administration's policy arguments have amounted to predictions - tax cuts will promote job growth, Saddam is close to having nukes, Iraq can be occupied with a minimum of U.S. manpower - that most experts believed to be wrong, but which couldn't be definitely disproven until events played out in the future."

"Let me make sure I've got this right," says Gary Kamiya. "After being insulted, belittled and called irrelevant by the swaggering machos in the Bush administration, the United Nations is now supposed to step forward to supply cannon fodder for America's disastrous Iraq occupation - while the U.S. continues to run the show? In other words, the rest of the world is to send its troops to get killed so that a U.S. president it fears and despises can take the credit for an invasion it bitterly opposed."

"U.S. battlefield casualties in Iraq are increasing dramatically in the face of continued attacks by remnants of Saddam Hussein's military and other forces, with almost 10 American troops a day now being officially declared 'wounded in action,'" the Washington Post's Vernon Lobe writes. With so many troops wounded in action and attacks on soldiers becoming "commonplace," U.S. Central Command only releases the number of wounded when asked -- "making the combat injuries of U.S. troops in Iraq one of the untold stories of the war," Lobe writes.

Alastair Campbell, the top spin doctor for British Prime Minister Tony Blair, has announced his resignation amid continuing controversy over his role in building the case for war with Iraq. Nicknamed England's "real deputy prime minister," Campbell said his family had paid a heavy price for the "real and intense" pressures of his job.