Iraq: Success!

Gorgeous pic from the one and only Maru

Sure smells an awful lot like failure, though.

Two female suicide bombers blew themselves up in pet markets in Baghdad. The death toll: 64 (at least, currently; more may die of their injuries). Approximately 107 people were wounded.

Raw Story is reporting that at least one of the bombers was a mentally impaired young woman who might have been bullied or bamboozled into functioning as a human missile and detonated remotely. Beyond disgusting, this is utterly depraved.

Pertinent excerpts from the article:

An official at Al-Kindi hospital said at least 34 bodies had been received. "We have a disaster here. There are too many bodies to count. Many of them are just pieces of flesh," he said.

The latest attacks came even as Iraqi officials reported civilian deaths across Iraq in January had fallen to a 23-month low.

US military commanders say [...] the peace is fragile and that while Al-Qaeda, which the commanders believe is behind most of the violence, is on the run, it is far from defeated.

Of course the peace is fragile, you blithering idiots. You're not fighting al-Qaeda per se, you're fighting hundreds of different factions - former Iraqi Army guys who lost their cushy jobs thanks to you; Islamist fundie loons who want to crush any hint of secularism; Sunnis who lost their favoured position; Shia who lost families, friends, jobs, homes; thugs who see an opportunity to loot, steal, and rob; breakaway factions of the Mahdi Army; thugs in the employ of SCIRI and Dawa thugs in power, seeking to consolidate their position. Shit, the list could go on forever.

There has been zero political progress. The so-called "new de-Ba'athification law" threatens to take away the livelihood of even more Sunni or former Ba'ath party members than the old one did. People are living in a fractured peace that results from typical guerilla army tactics: When the enemy advances, guerillas retreat; when the enemy retreats, guerillas attack. The "surge" has placed some 30,000 additional armed Americans in a danger zone where daily one or more of them loses a life or limb. The guerillas prudently retreat to Mosul or some other city and take potshots at Americans there.

It's their fucking country, you bozo morons. They can outwait you. Sooner or later, you have to come home, broken in body and mind. Them? All they have to do is keep killing one or two of you every day, or even every other day. What does it matter if they die? You're making sure that plenty of others show up to take the dead men's places. While back home, no one is showing up to take the places of those fallen in action. Young Republicans are too busy making money to sign up for the war, ya know.


You can barely get the high-school dropouts and gangbangers to sign on.

39 American soldiers killed during January. That was up from 23 in December and on a par with figures in October and November. That's one soldier or more per day. Not much lower from the stats for the past four years. And so it drags on.

Stumble It!