he Iraqi government, in fact, has no control over and will play no part in determining when and if American forces withdraw from the country. In short, Iraq remains under American occupation.

The foundational lie was that invading Iraq was a logical and necessary part of the phony war on terrorism. Iraq, under the secular dictatorship of Saddam Hussein, had nothing to do with terrorism. It had nothing to do with the attack on the U.S. It had nothing to do with Osama bin Laden, who publicly excoriated Saddam and was, in turn, excoriated by Saddam.

Saddam Hussein sent money to every Palestinian family who lost somebody in the intifada. It didn't matter how they were killed — shot by an Israeli sniper or killed carrying a bomb - the family got a check. The Bush administration chooses to call that supporting terrorism, but in fact, Saddam was supporting Palestinian independence. Palestinians, as with everyone else in the world, have the right to resist occupation of their country and are doing nothing that the Jews didn't do when they were resisting British occupation during the Palestine Mandate period.

Some religious cultists believe that God gave Palestine to the Israelis, but the last time I checked, God wasn't in the real estate business. British colonialism was.

The big lie used to sell the war to the gullible American public was the claim that Iraq possessed huge stockpiles of biological and chemical weapons and was pursuing a nuclear weapon. That proved false. There were no stockpiles, no programs to produce any, and no nuclear-weapons program. A Republican senator recently made a fool out of himself by claiming that a few old chemical shells scattered around the desert proved the WMD claim. To his embarrassment, even the Pentagon pooh-poohed his claim. Those old shells, now unusable, were scattered about by American bombing. Their existence had been known and noted a long time ago. As the Iraqis had told us repeatedly, they had not produced a chemical or biological weapon since prior to 1991.

Still another lie the Bush administration perpetrated was to inflate the importance of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the terrorist recently sent to hell by two 500-pound bombs. This was necessary to perpetuate the lie that most of the resistance was from foreign terrorists. No, most of the resistance was, has been and will continue to be from Iraqis who want us out of their country. Except for a couple of televised executions, we can't be sure what Zarqawi actually did. He was a Jordanian with no ties to Iraq. Two or three months ago, I predicted that it was only a matter of time before someone dropped a dime on him.

You will notice that after his death, the violence in Iraq has continued without as much as a hiccup. This indicates that he may have been taking credit for, or been given credit by the U.S. for, attacks others were committing.

The simple truth is that the invasion of Iraq had nothing to do with the war on terrorism. It was done to make the Middle East safe for Israel. The same group who led us into this war had been advocating invading Iraq long before the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

Americans should be outraged that they were lied into a war, but they seem to accept that passively. They are somewhat disgruntled that the war isn't going well and appears to be endless. That's at least something. Both the war in Iraq and the one in Afghanistan will last as long as American troops remain in those two countries.

The truth is that, in the end, we will have won nothing except lucrative contracts for American and British corporations. Those are not worth the life of one American, much less more than 2,500.