It's Not Like We Gave Iraq Reason to Give Thanks This Week Or Any Year Lately

I haven't had quite the heart to summon words to summarize the exponentially-past extreme violence in Iraq the last fews days - and that's not even including our locking down Sadr City and then, oh yes, and then sending in the U.S. helicopter gunships (the same ones we give to Israel so they can use them in the Palestinian refugee camps and Gaza) in measures designed to work like shooting captive fish in a barrel.

But JP at Welcome Back to Pottersville sums it up for you:

161 Iraqis dead, 257 wounded. If genocide was in the Bush playbook, then I guess this qualifies as turning another corner.

The day after election night, I made light of what we should be thankful for on Thanksgiving. But I guess we should’ve been grateful for one thing: That we weren’t Iraqi Shias.

Sectarian bloodshed in Iraq today, incredibly, reached a new level in savagery as over 160 people were killed by a series of five suicide car bombs. Add the injuries that have been reported and that brings the casualty toll to 417. 417 families devastated in one day.

While the 110 American troops that were lost in Iraq last month is certainly nothing to sneeze at, try to imagine what it must be like for an Iraqi civilian caught in the middle of this insanity, knowing that 417 lives have been lost or devastated in a nation of 26,000,000 (or it could be 25,000,000 by now at the rate things are going).

Our national population is over ten times greater than Iraq’s, yet their civilian population alone is getting slaughtered at an unimaginably more exponential rate. 161 Shi’ites alone murdered. In one day. Compare that to the barely-over three and a half American troops killed per day last month. It’s pretty safe to say, I think, that these men, women and children had no ties to al Qaeda or an insurgency. These Shi’ites who were killed today were killed in Sunni retaliation for the endless stream of mass graves that have been unearthed thanks to Shi’ite death squads. Unlike American and Iraqi troops, they did not sign on for this. Not even in the worst days of Saddam’s dictatorship have bodies been unearthed at this rate.

And yet we’re hearing the same lines time and again, over and over

Meanwhile, Dick Cheney's hugging King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia to "talk peace".

If God were paying attention, he would have smote Dick before the P of peace rolled off his forked tongue.