What’s The Matter With Bagdad?
by digby
I think it’s clear that the nation should want to keep the party in power that is responsible for this:
I keep seeing his face. He appears to be in his mid-20s, bespectacled, slightly bearded, and somehow his smile conveys a sense of prosperity to come. Perhaps he is set to marry, or enroll in graduate school, or launch a business — all of these flights of ambition seem possible.
In the next few images he is encased in plastic: His face is frozen in a ghoulish grimace. Blackened lesions blemish his neck.
“Drill holes,” says Col. Khaled Rasheed, an Iraqi commander who is showing me the set of photographs.
He preserves the snapshots in a drawer, the image of the young man brimming with expectations always on top. There is no name, no identification, just a series of photos that documents the transformation of some mother’s son into a slab of meat on a bloody table in a morgue.
“Please, please, I must show these photographs to President Bush,” Rasheed pleads in desperation, as we sit in a bombed-out palace along the Tigris, once the elegant domain of Saddam Hussein’s wife, now the command center for an Iraqi army battalion. “President Bush must know what is happening in Baghdad!”
He doesn’t care what is happening in Bagdad and neither does the Dark Lord Cheney. They think people getting literally drilled in the head is an Iraqi tactic to deny them a Republican majority.
On Oct. 17, Cheney told Limbaugh: ‘I was reading something today that a writer — I don`t remember who — was speculating on increased terrorist attacks in Iraq attempting to demoralize the American people as we get up to the election. And when I read that, it made sense to me. And I interpreted this as that the terrorists are actually involved and want to involve themselves in our electoral process, which must mean they want a change.
[…]
[The]show was not the first time Cheney has suggested terrorists have picked favorites in the upcoming election.
In August, Cheney told wire service reporters that ‘al-Qaida types’ were looking to break the will of the American people to stay and fight in Iraq and Afghanistan. He linked that al-Qaida effort to the Connecticut Democratic primary rejection of Iraq war supporter Sen. Joe Lieberman.
It’s all about them, you see.
That article linked above, called “Into The Abyss Of Baghdad,” shows just how much the Iraqis care about maintaining that majority in congress:
Every day the corpses pile up in the capital like discarded furniture — at curbside, in lots, in waterways and sewer lines; every day the executioners return. A city in which it was long taboo to ask, “Are you Sunni or Shiite?” has abruptly become defined by these very characteristics.
Once-harmonious neighborhoods with mixed populations have become communal killing grounds. Residents of one sect or the other must clear out or face the whim of fanatics with power drills.
[…]
People are here one day, gone the next. Those who do go out often venture no farther than familiar streets. In the sinister evenings, when death squads roam, people block off their lanes with barbed wire, logs, bricks to ward off the killers.
Many residents remain in their homes — paralyzed, going slowly crazy.
“My children are imprisoned at home,” says a cook, Daniel, a Christian whom I knew from better times, now planning to join the exodus from Iraq. “They are nervous and sad all the time. Baghdad is a big prison, and their home is a small one. I forced my son to leave school. It’s more important that he be alive than educated.”
But homes offer only an illusion of safety. Recently, insurgents rented apartments in mostly Shiite east Baghdad, filled the flats with explosives and blew them up after Friday prayers. Dozens perished.
Even gathering the bodies of loved ones is an exercise fraught with hazards. A Shiite Muslim religious party controls the main morgue near downtown; its militiamen guard the entrance, keen to snatch kin of the dead, many of them Sunni Muslim Arabs. Unclaimed Sunni corpses pile up.
[…]
On a recent patrol in Adamiya, one of the capital’s oldest sections, U.S. soldiers went door to door speaking with merchants and residents, trying to earn their confidence. Everyone seemed cordial as people spoke of their terror of Shiite militiamen. Then a shot rang out and a soldier fell 10 yards from where I stood with the platoon captain; a sniper, probably Sunni, had taken aim at this 21-year-old private from Florida ostensibly there to protect Sunnis against Shiite depredations. The GI survived.
Coursing through the deserted cityscape in an Army Humvee after curfew empties the streets is an experience laced with foreboding. U.S. vehicles, among the few on the road, offer an inviting target for an unseen enemy. Piles of long-uncollected trash may conceal laser-guided explosives. Russian roulette is the oft-repeated analogy.
“Everyone’s thinking the same thing,” a tense sergeant tells me. “IEDs,” he adds, using the shorthand for roadside bombs, or improvised explosive devices.
ONE evening, I accompanied a three-Humvee convoy of MPs through largely Shiite east Baghdad. Before leaving the base, the commander performed an unsettling ritual: He anointed the Humvees with clear oil, performing something akin to last rites.
[…]
At this point, anything seems possible here, a descent of any depth into the abyss. Militiamen and residents are already sealing off neighborhoods by sect. Some have suggested district-to-district ID cards. Word broke recently of a plan to build barriers around this metropolis of 6 million and block the city’s entrances with checkpoints. The “terror trench,” as some immediately dubbed it, seemed to have a fundamental flaw: The killers already are in Baghdad.
Sure, it’s a little “untidy” and all, but they should be a lot more grateful to the liberators who freed them and created this wonderful democratic paradise. Interfering with the Republicans’ ability to do more of this good work in their country is drilling through their faces to spite their noses.
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