Old Hickory's Weblog

"I just wonder if they will ever tell us the truth." - Harold Casey, Louisville, KY, October 2004

Robert Dreyfuss takes a sobering look at Iraq's Bloody July TomPaine.com 07/21/06:

Iraq is engaged in a full-fledged civil war. For those remaining defenders of the U.S. occupation of Iraq, who argue that the United States needs to stay put in order to prevent civil war, it’s too late. It’s here, in all of its brutality and ugliness.

The violence is not only engulfing Baghdad - home to approximately one-fifth of Iraq’s population—but Basra, Iraq’s second city and its only port.  In the north, there is violence in Kirkuk, in what has been, until now, the relatively unscathed heartland of the Shiite south, as well.

What is unfolding in Iraq is a staggering tragedy. An entire nation is dying, right in front of us. And the worst part of it is: It may be too late to do anything to stop it.

The toll among ordinary Iraqis is immeasurable. Iraqis are dying in ones and twos, in a wave of rampant murders, kidnappings, and assassinations throughout the country. They are dying in fives and tens, through roadside bombs, car bombs, and sectarian violence. And they are dying in large numbers, in scores, as organized armies carry out atrocity after atrocity in brazen, public attacks.

As in Beirut, Lebanon, during the 1975-1990 civil war that killed perhaps 100,000 people, lines are being drawn down the middle of Iraqi cities, signaling that the rough outlines of civil war territories are being staked out. ...

After more than a week of some of the most vicious sectarian violence of the war, Baghdad is a skeleton of a city ...

The blame for this carnage must be laid squarely at the feetof George W. Bush. The U.S. invasion of Iraq was ordered against the advice of the CIA, the State Department and most U.S. military officers, and in defiance of the United Nations, America’s allies, and the Arab world. The United States attacked and destroyed a nation that had never attacked the United States, which had no weapons of mass destruction and which had no connection to al-Qaida.