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One question Americans should be asking the Bush administration is why it wishes to do such an expensive favor for the Iraqi people.

I cannot think of any instance in which the federal government has been willing to spend $1 billion a week and 1,700 lives just to improve conditions in any one of the 50 states. Yet that is exactly what it is doing in Iraq, presumably for no other reason than to bring the blessings of liberty to a people we have bombed, starved, impoverished and vilified for 14 years.

Naturally, the democracy bit is a fallback excuse after the original justification for launching a preemptive war was proven false. There were no weapons of mass destruction. There was no nuclear program. There were no ties to al-Qaeda. There was no threat to the United States, imminent or otherwise.

These undisputed facts leave the American people with two choices. One, they can give President George Bush the benefit of the doubt and believe that he believed there actually were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. In that case, he is guilty of the most expensive blunder in the history of the United States. When such blunders are discovered, the normal course of events is to fire the people responsible. No such firings have occurred in the Bush administration. In fact, the Bush administration refuses to admit it made a mistake, however obvious the truth.

The second choice is to conclude that the president deliberately misled the American people