"In 2003, the cost of the war was put at $50bn (£27bn). It is $160bn and rising. The troops were promised they would be home within a year. Now the 135,000-strong US deployment will increase to 150,000, confronted by the grim reality of an open-ended stay. Suspicions grow that Iraq, has, in the words of Richard Clarke, White House counter-terrorism chief under President Bush, undermined the war on terror. Then there are those missing WMD, in whose name 650-odd Americans and untold thousands of Iraqis have died?Clearly, hell-bent on taking out Saddam Hussein, the Bush team ignored CIA warnings of how difficult post-war reconstruction would be. This President, whose casus belli over weapons of mass destruction (WMD) has proved a fiction, is accused of having his own yawning "credibility gap". Most Iraqis want America to succeed, Donald Rumsfeld, the Defence Secretary, assured the world again on Wednesday. "We haven't lost control," he said. But this was not the grinning, bullying, confident Rumsfeld of a year ago, mocking the fainthearted as US armoured columns roared across Iraq. This time, he was brusque and tight-faced, as he tried to explain dozens of new US casualties. Iraq is not Vietnam. Iraq is an unprovoked war of choice, launched by a US President against a regime that posed no threat to the US, or anyone else. " Independent.co.uk". A CNN/Time poll showed Friday that US public approval for Bush's handling of Iraq had slipped to 44 percent, with 51 percent opposed to it, as horrifying pictures of unrest flicker across television screens.