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Oh yes! - That other war in Iraq

"By the way, there are many American soldiers fighting in the Middle East.

In case you haven't noticed, they get killed. A lot of them get killed.

I was watching the endless television coverage of Israel and Hezbollah/Lebanon killing women and children, and then picking up the papers to read almost exclusively of the same thing. I found no picture on television and almost no mention in newspapers of Americans dying.

The dead babies of Lebanon and those dismembered by rockets in Israel are considered to be glorious distractions that allow our government to stroll the hallways that appear to have no blood on the floors."


That's veteran journalist Jimmy Breslin of Newsday writing - as reproduced on Alternet here.

The sad fact is that the war in Iraq shows no signs of abating - just to the contrary. Only the other day the morgue in Baghdad reported that in excess of 1800 bodies, many unkown, had been brought into the morgue during July. That had been the highest monthly number ever.

As things spiral out of control in Iraq the cynical might be tempted to suggest that the "diversion" of the Middle East conflict and now the terror threat of blowing up planes suits the Bush Administration down to the ground. Iraq has gone onto the back-burner!

Meanwhile, the Los Angeles Times reports:

"A day after a suicide bomber killed 35 people near a revered Shiite Muslim shrine, clerics across Iraq on Friday called for an end to the sectarian killing that one imam described as "waking every day to the view of blood."

The bombing near the Imam Ali Mosque in Najaf on Thursday ignited fresh sectarian passions that lingered over sermons in Shiite and Sunni mosques. Some Muslim clerics wondered whether Iraq had slipped too far, becoming a nation where the sounds of weeping mothers and praying imams were lost in the din of kidnappings, explosions and slaughter."

Whilst clerics blame the local Iraqi officials and US forces for the continuing carnage and bloodshed in Iraq, the critical question of how to bring the whole mess to an end seems ever elusive. Read the LA Times piece in full here. It's a sad and sobering picture of "life" in Iraq - the country, remember, subjected to an invasion to bring about democracy and freedom by toppling a dictator.

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