This Tuesday (March 20) is the fourth anniversary of the US invasion of Iraq. Anti-war marches and rallies were held across the United States on March 17-18 to mark the 40th anniversary of the historic 1967 anti-war march to the Pentagon during the Vietnam War and the fourth anniversary of the launch of the Iraq War.

Some senior citizens who had partaken in the anti-war marches in 1967 said at recent rallies that the ongoing Iraq war could not but reminded them of the Vietnam War of the late 1960s and early 1970s, from which the US government has not drawn any lessons but brought scourges and deaths to people of both countries. They acknowledged that their protests were aimed to urge the Bush administration to rein in and steer clear of the same old disastrous course. Anti-war protests and marches throughout the nation have shown more and more Americans have become aware that the Iraq War is truly a grave misfortune for the people of both nations.

For the United States, the loss of its "hard" or substantial strength is very apparent. To date, the war has claimed the lives of nearly 3,200 US soldiers and wounded 24,000 others, and cost the country 400 billion US dollars, and yet the end of the war is still far out of sight. The Clinton administration had left behind a financial surplus of more 300 billion dollars at the expiration of its term of office in 2000, whereas the Bush administration now suffers a deficit of close to 300 billion dollars, which had been rising to more than 400 billion dollars at times. For six years, the US government has had an accumulated debt of up to 2.2 trillion dollars.

In view of its "soft" or intangible strength, fighting for an unjust cause will bring nothing but destruction upon itself. A chain of POW-abuse scandals that have surfaced during the war, such as the Abu Ghraib abuse scandal, the infamous Haditha and Black Jail (in Europe) scandals, have smeared or tarnished the image and credit of the U.S. globally. Opinion polls conducted in various nations, including its closest allies Britain, Australia, Japan and Germany, all indicated that the U.S.' prestige has had a drastic fall. President George W. Bush met with protests everywhere during his recent visit to Latin America, and this implied what heavy prices the U.S. had paid for the war.

Furthermore, in term of a political scale at home, the increasingly unpopular war in Iraq has deprived the hawkish Republicans of its right for the control of Congress, and the support rate of President Bush himself has dropped steeply to 30 percent from 90 percent five years ago. What particularly noteworthy is that the war has distracted his attention from major domestic issues, and so some of his major administrative agendas have thus been marginalized.

In the meanwhile, the loss on the part of the Iraqi side is scores of times greater that of the American side. There are hundreds of thousands of civilian casualties, and 1.5 to 2 million refugees have fled their homes; there are ruins are everywhere in Iraq, with some of its cities and towns simply reduced to debris; numerous cultural gems or treasures have been looted or got lost; and its petroleum production and exports at present are much lower than the pre-war levels.

What is even more worrisome is that Iraq has been turned into a haven for terrorists, who stage terrorist activities almost daily, which are accompanied with intensified sectarian violence. All this has held Iraqis in fear and the whole nation have slipped to the fringe of a nationwide civil war.

President Bush had announced with pride the victory in the Iraq war to the entire world on May 1, 2003 and, four years later today, he, faced with anti-war waves, had to take shelter in the David Camp to mull over how to extricate himself and find a way out. In the words of a recent article of the Washington Post on its editorial page which was titled "Lesson: War", "The cost (of the war) in lives, injuries and dislocations, to Americans and Iraqis, has been tragic."

The four-year-old war has not only depleted its troops but cost a huge loss of money, and there is indeed a profound lesson for all to draw on. In fact, a genius ancient Chinese thinker and sage through the ages, Sun Tzu or Master Sun, hit the very vital spot, saying: "The art of war is of vital importance to the State. It is a matter of life and death, a road either for survival or perish, and so the issue has to be examined or scrutinized."

By People's Daily Online and its author Li Xuejiang, the noted chief resident PD reporter in the U.S.