Iraq - just the facts

Brief time line of the 5 year war in Iraq and statistics from CNN.com

• March 19, 2003 - President Bush ordered U.S. troops into Iraq after months of warnings that then-Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein was concealing stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons and efforts to build a nuclear bomb
• U.N. weapons inspectors found no sign of banned weapons before the invasion, and the CIA later concluded that Iraq had dismantled its weapons programs in the 1990s
• early April 2003 - Hussein's government fell
• December 2006 - Iraq's new government executed Hussein
• Late March 2008 - the 4000th American death in Iraq
  

The American death toll - 4,000+ deaths

• 3,263 have been killed in attacks and fighting
• 737 in non-hostile incidents, such as traffic accidents and suicides

Iraqi death toll and displacement of Iraqis (source: U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees)

• from about 80,000 to the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis dead (20 times more than the number of American deaths)
• Another 2 million Iraqis have been forced to leave the country
• 2.5 million Iraqis are displaced within Iraq

Etc

• Nearly 160,000 U.S. troops remain in Iraq
• $600 billion - cost to U.S. taxpayers (source: the House Budget Committee)
• The conflict is now widely unpopular among Americans:
• Only 32 percent of Americans support the conflict.
• 61 percent said they want the next president to remove most U.S. troops within a few months of taking office (source: a recent CNN-Opinion Research Corp. poll)

http://www.cnn.com/2008/WORLD/meast/03/23/iraq.main/index.html