According to Iraq Coalition Casualty Count, 247 American soldiers have died in Iraq since the famous transfer of “sovereignty” in June. And that doesn’t count the six soldiers who died in a helicopter crash yesterday.

CBSNews.com reports,

U.S. troops pounded the insurgent stronghold Fallujah with airstrikes and tank fire Sunday, and the Iraqi government appealed to residents of the city to expel “foreign terrorists” and “murderers” to prevent an all-out attack.

Insurgents, meanwhile, ambushed and killed nine Iraqi policemen as they were returning home from a training course in Jordan.

As I keyboard, on the same web page is a link to an interactive feature on “postwar” Iraq. As if.

The Duelfer Report, which confirmed that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction and was far from the threat the Bush Administration made it out to be, has already faded from the news.

Yesterday Knight Ridder released a report by Warren Strobel and John Walcott that revealed the U.S. went into Iraq with no postwar plans at all.

A Knight Ridder review of the administration’s Iraq policy and decisions has found that it invaded Iraq without a comprehensive plan in place to secure and rebuild the country. The administration also failed to provide some 100,000 additional U.S. troops that American military commanders originally wanted to help restore order and reconstruct a country shattered by war, a brutal dictatorship and economic sanctions.

In fact, some senior Pentagon officials had thought they could bring most American soldiers home from Iraq by September 2003. Instead, more than a year later, 138,000 U.S. troops are still fighting terrorists who slip easily across Iraq’s long borders, diehards from the old regime and Iraqis angered by their country’s widespread crime and unemployment and America’s sometimes heavy boots.

“We didn’t go in with a plan. We went in with a theory,” said a veteran State Department officer who was directly involved in Iraq policy.

Vice President Dick Cheney, one of the chief architects of the non-plan and a former proponent of the “they’ll greet us with flowers” theory, says in his campaign stump speech that John Kerry’s plans for Iraq are “naive.”

On Saturday, the Boston Globe reported that

About half of the roughly $5 billion in Iraq reconstruction funds disbursed by the US government in the first half of this year cannot be accounted for, according to an audit commissioned by the United Nations, which could not find records for numerous rebuilding projects and other payments.

Meanwhile, Iraq’s former nuclear facilities and the equipment therein have been systematically dismantled and carried away to who knows where. The United States and the provisional Iraqi government can’t or won’t admit anything is wrong, even though the UN says entire buildings are missing.

In other news — the economy wheezes and gasps along, staggering under record oil prices. Joblesss claims are up. There is a near-record trade deficit. The budget deficit continues to balloon.

Workers’ payments for health benefits rose nearly three times faster than wages from 2000 to 2004, and many people are getting weaker coverage for their money. The number of uninsured people grew from 39.8 million in 2000 to 45 million in 2003, according to the Census Bureau. And as the health care system sinks under the weight of growing costs, uninsured people skip checkups and delay treatments.

On the stump, President Bush warns audiences that John Kerry’s health care proposal would lead to rationing.

This weekend, leading newspapers around the country endorsed Senator John Kerry for President. Wrote the Boston Globe,

These are challenging times for any leader. On the signal issues of this campaign — the Iraq war and terrorism — Kerry is up to the challenge. Persuading our allies to share more of the military and economic burden in Iraq is a daunting task, but only Kerry has the credibility to bring them to the table. Iraq, simply put, is out of control. Kerry is best qualified bring it under control, not least by reassuring the Iraqis themselves that the United States does not have permanent designs on their strategic bases or oil. On terrorism, Kerry understands that intelligence, police work, diplomacy, and economic development are the the principal weapons against a diffuse but knowable enemy.

At home, Kerry is a strong supporter of civil rights and women’s rights. His nominees to the Supreme Court would not be likely to roll back decades of important gains for women and minorities.

He would rein in the Bush deficit by restoring 1990s-era tax rates to the top brackets. Although we fear that rolling back the tax cuts will not produce enough revenue to halve the deficit and implement Kerry’s ambitious healthcare plan, his priorities are right: to restore fiscal sanity and to reduce the number of Americans without health insurance — at 45 million, a national scandal.

John Kerry has done more than most to heal the wounds of the nation’s last great polarizing struggle, Vietnam, traveling there with Republican Senator John McCain to settle the issue of MIAs and normalize relations. He is best suited to heal our painful rifts now — not just with the community of nations but within this nation, rent by social, ideological, economic, and religious divisions. These sap the strength of America. We are confident a Kerry presidency will restore both unity and strength.

This weekend, cable news programs were populated by cheerful, attractive, well-groomed people chattering endlessly about John Kerry’s remark about Mary Cheney in the third debate.

Somewhere in America, an undecided voter is telling a reporter that they like Bush’s confidence and worry that Kerry is a flip-flopper.