A depressing tale in the LA Times (Bug Me Not)discussing a situation that is playing out all too often in Iraq:
It seems these violent days need more prayers than hours can hold, but the old man prays anyway, raising his hands and closing his eyes, whispering verse as the tribal boys watch from the dusty courtyard.
They know what Mohammed Mousa Tahir prays about. They have heard the low moan of his voice, like wind through a field. Tahir says U.S. troops shot his son in a car on an overpass. He buried the boy, and then, a few days later, word came through the littered streets of his neighborhood: Six nephews and cousins had been slain and mutilated and left alongside a road by unknown attackers.
“The Americans killed my son, but if they come to my house, I will tell them: ‘Peace be upon you,’ ” said Tahir, a Shiite tribal elder, basing his account on unconfirmed reports. “I only want the Americans to help my society and stop this war. I must be patient. I don’t know exactly what happened to my son. I just know I waited for him to return home, but he did not come.”
Bloodshed in Iraq is both calculated and indiscriminate. The unluckiest are caught in explosions and insurgent ambushes. Others, like Tahir’s cousins and nephews, are killed over religious and tribal loyalties. And then there are the ones like his son, Haithem, a 25-year-old Baghdad University student heading east on a highway toward a military convoy in a jittery city, the kind of place where the hands of suicide bombers are found duct-taped to steering wheels.
Uggh.
RheGirl
Got a link?
DecidedFenceSitter
Or you could, ya know, go to the website indicated and look it up.
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/iraq/la-fg-family20jun20,0,3089710.story?coll=la-home-headlines
In case it doesn’t work. “A Clan Scoured by Death” on the LA Times website mainpage as of 12:15 EST.
jcricket
It really is said that we’ve gotten to a place where the average Iraqi is so conflicted about how they view the US. And before you go there, it’s not the the fault of the media or liberals. Our own actions, combined with the history of the region, have gotten us into this increasingly untenable situation. The war on terror is about “hearts and minds”, after all.
Joe Gandelman on The Moderate Voice had a good point about this when discussing a recent story about a “terrorist torture manual” (written in Arabic) discovered by Marines in IRAQ, when he wrote:
“Just think what impact THIS STORY would have had if it had surfaced without any stories coming before it about abuse of Iraqis by U.S. jailers.”
Link to Joe’s blog posting
Mark Kraft
I wanted to pass along this link to you:
http://cryptome.org/bkz/buhriz-kill01.htm
It shows U.S. soldiers planting weapons in photos of dead and injured Iraqi teens, apparently a group of unarmed teens who were accidentally shot on a day in which the U.S. were attacked by the insurgents.
It’s yet another disgraceful example of the horrible situation the Bush administration has put our troops in, fighting a war where everyone is a potential insurgent.
docG
For Iraqis, what is the functional difference between murders by Hussein’s thugs and the current batch of murdering thugs?
When you jump out of a plane without a parachute, you can describe the beauty and success of the trip all you want on the way down, but you will not like the reality that the ending will inevitably bring.
ppgaz
Building a stable democracy is, well, “hard work”, as we all know.
The failure rate over the last hundred years or so is about 80% according to the academics who chart such things.
The Downing Street memos are painting a picture of planning for this mess, before any of us knew they were even thinking about it, which apparently rated “democratization” as not the first choice for what to do with the Iraq car after our dog caught it. Which of course puts the lie to the nonsense that we went in there to build democracy.
Unfortunately, we are stuck with the “democracy” ruse now, and can’t walk out without endangering our armed forces even more in the long run. We’re stuck, to coin a phrase.
But, sorry, there’s important news about the Arruba Damsel coming in now, gotta go …….
Anderson
I really hope that, if I were an Iraqi, and if U.S. troops got trigger-happy and offed my innocent wife in traffic, I would join the insurgency & try to kill some American soldiers (just as, if the insurgents killed my wife, I hope I’d attack them).
Right or wrong, this is not, I think, a reaction that we can easily condemn. (Tho I may be about to find out otherwise. If you would react by shrugging and saying “win some, lose some,” feel free to comment to that effect.)
And according to this story, the U.S. isn’t even bothering to try to count how many accidental killings have been committed by our troops. IMHO, anything that our thoroughly modern military doesn’t care to count, it doesn’t care about, period.
scs
Perhaps we should start requiring that young Iraqi students get diversity training in school so they get over their antiquated tribal rivalies. It works (mostly) here in the US with all the different races we have here. Or maybe a Real World TV series, Iraq style. It sounds stupid but teaching the young generation is the only way they are going to get over the tribal rivalies that lead to so much suffering.
RheGirl
Or you could, ya know, go to the website indicated and look it up.
Did and couldn’t find it at the time I asked. Thank you anyway.
RheGirl
Or you could, ya know, go to the website indicated and look it up.
Did and couldn’t find it at the time I asked. Thank you anyway.