OK Mike, Heartland Wife agrees with you...she says there is an article in the journal "Nature" talking about 1/2 million deaths. So, maybe the number is between the 2 for excess deaths. Even your last paragraph sounds pretty reasonable, although I have not been going quite that far. MY antiwar efforts have been pretty feeble, but they started before the war started: I don't think I saw it being a quagmire then: I saw it as being wrong. "60 Minutes" last night used the whole hour to follow a National Guard unit from Iowa (hey, that's next door) for 2 years. Some of the older soldiers, or at least the father of a father-son pair, saw us going into Iraq to chase the terrorists who caused 9/11. Our leadership seems to have succeeded in their efforts to mis-inform: it is well-know that it is the result of our invasion that allowed Al Qaeda to enter Iraq and now Iraq is a breeding ground for terrorists (and a cause for terrorists around the world. Lewis Black had a good point when he went after the democrats and asked how they could not come up with a candidate who could defeat Bush in 2004. History is going to look back on the re-election is inexplicable. Mike...as for the books you read: I have trouble reading the last decade or so: I got a couple of informative books on oil supply, global warming, and got bogged down a little ways in. I'm thinking of getting Cathryn's book and seeing if I make it through that.

Canie is relatively patient with our off topic posts like this but we need to keep a high percentage of science posts relative to off topic. I think we are doing that so far. We are asked to flag them as "off topic". Although, it's not 100% off topic because science funding will be competing with the interest on the debt for decades after the war is over (and the war on terror will not be over in any decade soon).
Chris