• 423,998 U.S. MILITARY personnel were deployed;
  
• other Coalition forces sent an additional 42,987 troops.
  
• The total is roughly equivalent to the
  population of Albuquerque, N.M.
  
• The war lasted 720 hours.
  
• The allies
  flew more than 41,400 sorties.
  
• That consumed 18,622 tons of fuel, enough
  to keep a Boeing 737-300 airliner aloft for about 12 years.
  
• The Coalition flew 1,801 aircraft-all but 138 were American.
  
• The Iraqis were showered with 31,800,000 leaflets bearing 81 different Messages. End to end, the leaflets would have made 120,454 rolls of toilet paper.
  
• Coalition forces lost 20 aircraft, but only 7 as a result of enemy fire.
  
• Search-and-rescue teams flew 55 missions and saved 73 people.
  
• 80 aircraft were flown to gather intelligence; they took 42,000 pictures of the battlefield, transmitted 3,200 hours of video and eavesdropped on 2,400 hours of Iraqi communications.
  
• Known costs: $917,744,361.55 - an amount equivalent to 46 minutes, 10.5 seconds' worth of total U.S. economic output in 2001.

"We were surprised," Dr. Anmar Uday told the BBC about the supposed rescue. "There was no military, there were no soldiers in the hospital. It was like a Hollywood film. [The U.S. forces] cried 'Go, go, go,' with guns and blanks without bullets, blanks and the sound of explosions," Uday said. "They made a show for the American attack on the hospital — [like] action movies [starring] Sylvester Stallone or Jackie Chan."

The footage from the raid, shot not by journalists but by soldiers with night-vision cameras, was fed in real time to the central command in Qatar. The video was artfully edited by the Pentagon and released as proof that a battle to free Lynch had occurred when it had not.

This fabrication has already been celebrated by an A&E special and will soon be an NBC movie. The Lynch rescue story — a made-for-TV bit of official propaganda — will probably survive as the war's most heroic moment, despite proving as fictitious as the stated rationales for the invasion itself.

If the movies, books and other renditions of "saving Private Lynch" were to be honestly presented, it would expose this caper as merely one in a series of egregious lies marketed to us by the Bush administration.

With the overthrow of Saddam's regime, the flow of an estimated $30 million to Palestinian families has ended. The last payment came a week before the start of the U.S. invasion of Iraq.

While the public relations effect of the payments overshadowed the minor contribution to the Palestinian economy, the loss of Iraqi support underlines the narrowing circle of outside backers for Palestinian militants.

"When an Arab regime that is known to support the Palestinian cause falls, it weakens the Palestinian national struggle," said Wassel Abu Yusef of the Palestine Liberation Front, whose leader — Achille Lauro hijacker Abu Abbas — was captured in Iraq last month.

"This support helped the Palestinian people and the martyrs' families to continue the struggle against the Israelis," he said.

With annual per capita income in the West Bank and Gaza Strip at less than $850, the Iraqi payouts were a windfall for the bereaved families.

Mr. Shkukani, a retired local employee of the United Nations, said the $25,000 has been exhausted since the money was divvied up among the nine surviving siblings, including university tuition for a sister living in Youngstown, Ohio.