…the most important front in the counterinsurgency, improving basic social and economic conditions, is the one on which we have failed most miserably. Two million Iraqis are in refugee camps in bordering countries. Close to two million more are internally displaced and now fill many urban slums. Cities lack regular electricity, telephone services and sanitation. “Lucky” Iraqis live in gated communities barricaded with concrete blast walls that provide them with a sense of communal claustrophobia rather than any sense of security we would consider normal.

In a lawless environment where men with guns rule the streets, engaging in the banalities of life has become a death-defying act. Four years into our occupation, we have failed on every promise, while we have substituted Baath Party tyranny with a tyranny of Islamist, militia and criminal violence. When the primary preoccupation of average Iraqis is when and how they are likely to be killed, we can hardly feel smug as we hand out care packages. As an Iraqi man told us a few days ago with deep resignation, “We need security, not free food.”

The International Herald Tribune sums up the casualties inflicted on three out of the seven authors like this:

…the Sept. 10 accident in Baghdad that killed seven soldiers, including two sergeants who helped write a New York Times op-ed article critical of the Pentagon’s assessment of the Iraq war.

Sergeant Omar Mora and Sergeant Yance Gray were among seven noncommissioned officers who wrote the Aug. 19 piece entitled “The War as We Saw It” expressing doubts about American gains in Iraq.

The military said the accident occurred in the Baghdad suburb of Shula when soldiers from the 1st Infantry Division’s 2nd Brigade were in an armored transport truck on their way back from a raid in which they had captured three insurgents suspected of attacks on U.S. and Iraqi soldiers.

Another co-author of the op-ed article, Staff Sergeant Jeremy Murphy, was shot in the head while the article was being written. He was flown to a military hospital in the United States and is expected to survive.

Thanks for calling me on the slipshod part of that post. The subject deserved more time than I gave it last night.

King George is gorging on the ill will his arrogance and tyrannical buffoonery has caused in the world. George Bush Junior is not a real man, he’s a ham that has trouble talking, much less leading.

Now Turkey needs to condemn USA for genocide of native Americans.