JOSHUA FRANK: Sectarian Flames

[Tace]

By Joshua Frank -- World News Trust

It was just last month that President Bush assured the world that the situation in Iraq was dramatically improving. Sectarian tensions were going to relax as a result of Zarqawi’s overly publicized death. As Bush put it bluntly, the death of Zarqawi served as “an opportunity for Iraq's new government to turn the tide in this struggle." But it’s becoming painfully evident that Zarqawi, like Saddam’s illusive WMDs, was just another creation of the U.S. propaganda machine.

There were other times the White House attempted to paint the chaos in Iraq in a positive light. Remember when U.S. armed forces annihilated Saddam’s wretched sons Oday and Qusay? Or how about when they captured Saddam and promised things were starting to look up? At best these token events only served as minor diversions for most of the U.S. media, not unlike the alleged thwarting of a terrorist attack on the Holland Tunnel in New York did late last week.

Over the weekend, Sunni and Shi’ite militias were said to be responsible for the deaths of more than 60 Iraqi civilians while injuring dozens more. Just another tranquil weekend in the streets of Baghdad. Rarely do we hear reports of what’s going on outside the Green Zone, where the ethnically driven civil war is believed to even worse.

On June 6, shortly before Zarqawi’s death, the infamous blogger behind “Baghdad Burning” reported; “There’s an ethnic cleansing in progress and it’s impossible to deny. People are being killed according to their ID card ... We hear about Shia being killed in the ‘Sunni triangle’ and corpses of Sunnis named ‘Omar’ (a Sunni name) arriving by the dozen at the Baghdad morgue. I never thought I’d actually miss the car bombs. At least a car bomb is indiscriminate. It doesn’t seek you out because you’re Sunni or Shia.”

Unfortunately, political opposition to the war is weak here in the United States. Washington supports an ongoing occupation, if it can even be called such a thing these days. Dissent is all but dead in DC, where candidates so-often flex their foreign policy muscle in fear that they’ll be looked at as soft on terror.

more

http://worldnewstrust.org/modules/AMS/article.php?storyid=3872

[Dhalgren]

1. The world is insane and the US is the main lunatic.

We are so far past any remote justification, that now we must finally admit that we simply love the killing...

[Warpy]

2. "infamous blogger????"

I have a sneaking suspicion Riverbend might be pleased with that title, but I'm not. I guess infamy these days consists of telling the truth about the horror that Iraq has become.

I just hope she's all right. She hasn't checked in for far too long, a month today. I hope her family have all fled to live with relatives in the country, where it may be safer.