Robert Dreyfuss, The Iraqi Insurgency and Us

TomDispatch - Tomgram: Robert Dreyfuss, The Iraqi Insurgency and Us:

"Remember Saddam's 'killing fields'? By now, the Bush administration has turned whole swathes of Iraq into a charnel house. Last week Hala Jaber, a fine British reporter, returned to Baghdad and visited one of today's killing fields -- that city's morgue into which, from what she calls 'the nightly slaughter,' approximately 6,000 corpses have been delivered since the first of the year. 'Each corpse,' she writes, 'tells a different story about the terrors of Iraq. Some bodies are pocked with holes inflicted by torturers with power drills. Some show signs of strangulation; others, with hands tied behind the back, bear bullet wounds. Many are charred and dismembered.'

Baghdad, she relates, is a city in which the 'main topic of conversation in most households is death -- who is the latest to have been killed, what depraved technique was used and whether it is safe to go out.'

It was into that city of death -- or rather its American death-lite version -- that our President flew last week, just over three years after he famously declared 'mission accomplished' on the flight deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln. He landed at Baghdad's airport, helicoptered into the Green Zone, that heavily fortified American citadel, in 25 pounds of body armor, surprised the new prime minister, looked him 'in the eyes,' and declared himself 'inspired.' It was, as Sidney Blumenthal put it, 'mission accomplished' in a business suit.' "
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