Der Spiegel: Life In Baghdad Since The Fall Of Saddam

The situation in Iraq on the eve of the anniversary of "Operation Iraqi Freedom" has both opponents and supporters of the American military campaign puzzled. The body of a Catholic archbishop is found near the northern city of Mosul, and yet the US embassy in Baghdad is holding a garage sale as if it were peacetime. There has been a slight rise in the number of attacks again, and Douglas Feith, one of the Pentagon's principal architects of the war, is about to publish a book in which he seeks to justify his decisions. The United States has been in Iraq longer than it fought in World War II. The conflict is getting long in the tooth.

In America's public consciousness, the number of American soldiers killed in Iraq has stagnated since the summer of 2007. At the time, more than half of respondents to opinion polls knew that 3,500 GIs had been killed, but today only a quarter of Americans know that the number has increased to 4,000. According to Joseph Stiglitz, winner of the 2001 Nobel Prize in economics, the war has already cost the country at least $3 trillion.

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