Bush's War

by Mary

TomDispatch has a post by Dahr Jamail which starkly lays out the nightmare world Iraqis inhabit today. Here is a letter he received from a friend in Iraq who gave him an update about whether another friend had been found after being kidnapped.

Habibi,

Today I went to the morgue. I saw horrible things there. I didn't see [H's] photo among them. Some figures cannot be easily recognized because of the blood or the face is terribly deformed. I saw also only heads; those who were slayed, it's unbelievable. Tomorrow, we will have another visit to make sure again. In your country, when somebody wants to go to the morgue, he may naturally see two or, say, three or four bodies. For us, I saw hundreds today. Every month, the municipality buries those who are not recognized by their families because of the capacity of the morgue. Imagine!

Along with DemocracyNow's interview with our soldiers and the horrific piece in the Nation that shows that for many soldiers the mission is no longer to help the Iraqi people, it's a now a brutal war of survival. ... And revenge. Too bad the average Iraqi is trapped in the crossfire. It has taken a lot to make the time under Saddam look not so bad, but it seems Bush has accomplished that. More from Dahr Jamail:

The hardest thing, in the California sun with that cool breeze on my face, is to know that two realities in two grimly linked countries coexist, and most people in my own country are barely conscious of this.

In Iraq, of course, there is nothing disparate, no disjuncture, only a constant, relentless grinding and suffering, a pervasive condition of tragic hopelessness and despair with no end in sight.

And thus, we see the price that is paid for Bush's quest for immortality.