On the Ground

Forget the political ideology, the oil, the money and the all the sorryass excuses for starting this debacle in Iraq, just look at the ground. The article below beat out a few others with much the same stories but lower “kill numbers”; one right after another, day in and day out. This one really takes the cake.

250 Are Killed in Major Iraq Battle (excerpt NYT 1/29/2007)

The precise affiliation of the militants was unclear. Asad Abu Ghalal, the governor of Najaf Province, said the fighters in the orchard were Iraqi and foreign, some wearing the brown, white and maroon regalia of Pakistani and Afghan fighters. He said they had come to assassinate Shiite clerics and attack religious convoys that were gathering in Najaf, one of Shiite Islam’s holiest cities, and other southern cities for Ashura, a Shiite holiday that starts Monday night. Mr. Ghalal said the fighters called themselves the Soldiers of Heaven, and seemed to be part of a wider Sunni effort to disrupt Ashura, which marks the seventh-century death of the Prophet Muhammad’s grandson Hussein. But two senior Shiite clerics said the gunmen were part of a Shiite splinter group that Saddam Hussein helped build in the 1990s to compete with followers of the venerated Shiite religious leader Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani. They said the group, calling itself the Mehwadiya, was loyal to Ahmad bin al-Hassan al-Basri, an Iraqi cleric who had a falling out with Muhammad Bakr al-Sadr — father-in-law of the Shiite leader Moktada al-Sadr — in Hawza, a revered Shiite seminary in Najaf.

So, are you now clear on who doesn’t like who, why they don’t and what’s to be done about it? I am no rocket scientist, but as I sat here four years ago - embarrassed to be an American - watching the Awe and Destruction of Baghdad, that same article was already running through my head. I even predicted public hangings and heads rolling on the ground. I saw a clip of 50 Iraqi women dressed head to toe in black with narrow slits for their eyes - so they are at least allowed to see - with their arms raised making high shrieking Curly noises - whoopwhoopwhoopwhooopwhooop. These people murder, torture and kill school children for GOD. The entire region is soaked in religious fundamentalism out of the Dark Ages, based upon the worst of human conditions, revenge and violence. It is an alien world in which we have no business being, sacrificing thousands of our own, or tens of thousands of others. Only a president also from the Dark Ages (Texas) could have got us into this mess.

I lived through this same thing 40 years ago during Vietnam and find the differences negligible. It's a brown world rather than green, with lots of brown. They hide in rubble in lieu of jungle, with lots of rubble. It's hot and dry rather that hot and wet, with lots of dry and lots of hot. It is not even a matter of which city, town or building to bomb, but rather which person in which room of what hut, with lots of huts. And of course the same old show stopper, they are our friends by day and enemies by night, making the entire thing a lose-lose situation. Even a person of middling intelligence and an average concept of common sense could have seen what would come. It took half of America seven years to grasp what the other half had understood the day this dufus was named President.

Facebook | Digg | Reddit | Stumble | Buzz it! | Email Article |

---