Well, the great Iraqi WMD Hunt of 2003 appears to be wind­ing down. The Asso­ci­ated Press reports:

Weapons-hunters are spend­ing more time on base, intel­li­gence experts have been reas­signed to work on the coun­terin­sur­gency, and the man lead­ing a search for chem­i­cal, bio­log­i­cal and nuclear weapons is think­ing of bow­ing out.

The con­ven­tional wis­dom is that no one in the elec­torate cares any­more. Saddam’s been caught! “The war’s going great!”:http://gallup.com/poll/releases/pr031219.asp
But they should care, because — and this will come as no sur­prise, but I have to say it — this war was fought using the Amer­i­can people’s tax money and their sons and daugh­ters. Since March 20, 548 troops from Coali­tion coun­tries “have died”:http://lunaville.org/warcasualties/Summary.aspx, at the aver­age rate of 1.6 a day.
Cit­i­zens should care because they were lied to. There’s really no polite way to say it, but the White House lied about the threat of Saddam’s WMDs to get the Amer­i­can peo­ple to sup­port the war. And it worked. Now, $87 bil­lion and almost 550 dead sol­diers later, the hunt is almost played out.
“It’s prob­a­bly time to call it quits,” said Hans Blix, the for­mer chief U.N. weapons inspec­tor, whose teams were given one-third the time the United States has spent look­ing for weapons.
“The U.S. and the U.K. are so wed­ded to the idea that the Iraqis were hid­ing things that they are not will­ing to explore the pos­si­bil­ity that they’re wrong,” Blix said.
If there’s any­thing good that came out of the cam­paign of mass decep­tion, I’d like to think that the Amer­i­can peo­ple won’t be fooled twice. Per­haps that real­iza­tion hit Karl Rove, too, and may be another rea­son Wash­ing­ton and Lon­don chose to believe Col. Muam­mar al-Qadhafi when he said he would give up his WMDs and allow UN inspec­tors in. Because the White House couldn’t cry wolf twice, Qad­hafi is now a man the West can do busi­ness with instead of a lyin’, theivin’, treach­er­ous dic­ta­tor, like Sad­dam Hus­sein.
But per­haps my faith in the com­mon sense of the Amer­i­can peo­ple is mis­placed. I mean, accord­ing to a recent Gallup poll, “53 per­cent of Amer­i­cans think Sad­dam Hus­sein was per­son­ally involved in the 9/11 attacks”:http://gallup.com/poll/releases/pr031219.asp, _up_ 10 points from a sim­i­lar poll take in Sep­tem­ber.
The Amer­i­can peo­ple were lied to — they should be angry. Instead, they’re still will­ingly believ­ing lies.