Diaries and pics from Iraq

[rainbow4321]

http://electroniciraq.net/news/1730.shtml

Smoke rises continually from the acres of garbage that fill the river bend in the Green Zone, US occupation headquarters, across the Tigris from our apartment. Apparently, with the security risks of dozens of garbage trucks entering and departing the Green Zone daily, someone decided to dump it all along the river, outside the concrete walls. It must be like the constantly burning "Gehenna" or hell that Jesus mentioned in the Sermon on the Mount. My memory is that Gehenna is an image of the valley below Jerusalem where the garbage was dumped and burned.

Here in Iraq it represents the waste that accumulates as the US war against Iraq soon enters month twenty. There are over 1200 dead US soldiers and maybe 20,000 injured. Iraqi civilian deaths are between twenty and one hundred thousand. Injured aren't counted. Dead Iraqi soldiers and resistance fighters - anyone have any numbers? It was all to remove one man, Sadaam Hussein, from power. The country of Iraq is in shambles and going down. The price of gasoline in the US has increased about one dollar per gallon. The reputation of the US around the world - want to measure that change? The US deficit is incomprehensible. But I hear we are winning.

It isn't that the Iraqis couldn't have removed their president by themselves had they been given a space without sanctions. Iraqis are talented, well-educated people. Civilizations have risen from the lands between these rivers and will again, I'm sure. They need the chance again after we provide the resources to rebuild what was destroyed in the war and, at least, pull US troops back to their bases

[Ironpost]

1. Pull US troops back to their bases, that aren't in Iraq