I know I promised a more cheerful post this time, but I once again ran into Baghdad Burning, a blog by a young Iraqi woman living in the city. I hadn’t read her blog for some time, and unfortunately the news isn’t good:

…That is Iraq right now. The Americans have done a fine job of working to break it apart. This last year has nearly everyone convinced that that was the plan right from the start. There were too many blunders for them to actually have been, simply, blunders. The 'mistakes' were too catastrophic. The people the Bush administration chose to support and promote were openly and publicly terrible- from the conman and embezzler Chalabi, to the terrorist Jaffari, to the militia man Maliki. The decisions, like disbanding the Iraqi army, abolishing the original constitution, and allowing militias to take over Iraqi security were too damaging to be anything but intentional….

Had I not chronicled those feelings of agitation [for American casualties] in this very blog, I wouldn't believe them now. Today, they simply represent numbers. 3000 Americans dead over nearly four years? Really? That's the number of dead Iraqis in less than a month. The Americans had families? Too bad. So do we. So do the corpses in the streets and the ones waiting for identification in the morgue.

Is the American soldier that died today in Anbar more important than a cousin I have who was shot last month on the night of his engagement to a woman he's wanted to marry for the last six years? I don't think so.

She doesn’t claim to speak for all Iraqis, but I can’t help but think this is a much more accurate picture of what life is like in Baghdad these days than you will find in most news accounts. Her take on Saddam’s execution is the next post after the one linked, and it has some interesting insights as well.

I swear I’ll post something more cheerful soon! But every day some new reminder comes up of this monstrous thing our country has done to theirs. And all of us, even we who opposed the war and hate George Bush and all he stands for, are a party to it. And I just feel helpless in that knowledge.