Iraq

That is all.

I have spent the last 72 hours scouring videos online, looking for citizen journalism from Iraq. I've found scores of video blogs and bits by US soldiers. I cannot find any videos created by Iraqis from inside Iraq. It may be because, I do not speak Arabic. Yet I doubt that's the case --there are quite a number of propaganda videos from the different insurgencies fighting in Iraq.

What I speak of is of videos coming from Iraqi cellular phones or digital cameras. I speak of videos where Iraqis may have filmed their surroundings, their day to day and put out on the web for any and all to witness and never forget.

Iraq by Iraqis in Iraq are nowhere to be found.

The measure of a brutal imperialistic force is in it's effective silencing of the people they've set out to conquer, submit, silence and colonize.

We The People Of The United States have been complicit in the silencing of Iraqis, in the wiping away of their culture and history, in the destruction of their freedom of speech and freedom to be by destroying their homes, destroying their country's infrastructure, destroying their economy.

Blackwater is a mercenary organization with close ties to Republican politicians. They are one of the many incompetent war profiteers that the Bush/McCain Republicans love so much. Right now they are best known for a scandal where their poorly disciplined and improperly led mercenaries opened fire on Iraqi civilians. Blackwater's slaughter of these civilians has been declared unjustified and has led to an FBI investigation. This scandal led to resignation of US state department official Richard Griffin and a call for more oversight of these "private contractors" (a code word for Republican war profiteers).

So, when a company performs this badly, what does the Bush Administration do?
Renew their contract, of course! Despite being involved in a scandal that led to the downfall of a State Department official and a considerable blow to our attempts to win the hearts and minds of Iraqis, Blackwater is rewarded with a renewal to the contract. This is the very definition of mismanagement and it has become the signiture of Republican policy: reward the incompetent.

Of course we already knew that incompetence is rewarded by the Republicans. Halliburton is another one of these Republican war profiteer organizations that consistently disply amazing incompentence. Yet Halliburton still gets any contract they want from the Republicans, despite frequently overcharging for their services, being blatantly corrupt, and being incompetent in the delivery of services to the point of actually regularly letting our soldiers get electrocuted rather than actually fulfill their contract.

The much touted "surge" that was dreamed up by John McCain and pushed so eagerly by George Bush, Joe Lieberman and most Republicans (against the advice of many generals) first saw a large INCREASE in violence in Iraq as ethnic clensing of neighborhoods in Bagdhad and elsewhere ran its course. Then there was a lull in violence, as formerly mixed Shia/Sunni neighborhoods became sharply segregated. But Bush, McCain and Lieberman claimed that the surge was working.

This month should put an end to that claim. As civil war broke out again, violence skyrocketed. From BBC news:

The monthly figure of people killed in Iraq rose by 50% in March compared with the previous month, according to official government counts.

A total of 1,082 Iraqis, including 925 non-combatant civilians, were killed, up from 721 in February...

March also saw an increase in bombings and intense fighting between Shia militiamen and government forces.

The number of deaths last month seems to confirm a trend of rising deaths due to violence.

More than 1,800 people were killed in August 2007. This declined to 540 in January 2008, but the figure has risen steadily since...

What happened was not that the surge worked. What happened was that al-Sadr has been calling the shots. When he declared a cease fire, violence went down.

Depending on who you ask, the Iraq war costs anything from a low $200 million, to a moderate $411 million to a whopping $720 million a day.

The American Friends Service Committee calls for the immediate withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq and they have put together this video describing in numbers the financial toll the war is having on the country's ability to deal with its domestic issues. When you spend $720 million in a failed war, you can't spend it in health care, schools, jobs or the current housing crisis.

Watch the video.

Here's the list of US Senators who dared to say "NO" to the war in Iraq:

Jeffords (I-VT)
Kennedy (D-MA)
Leahy (D-VT)
Levin (D-MI)
Mikulski (D-MD)
Murray (D-WA)
Reed (D-RI)
Sarbanes (D-MD)
Stabenow (D-MI)
Wellstone (D-MN)
Wyden (D-OR)

[NB: Emphasis mine]

In case you need a refresher, here's the list of Democrats who voted to give George W. Bush the power to spend $200 million a day in a war that gave us no "weapons of mass destruction" yet which has displaced as internal refugees more than 2 million Iraqis and forced another 3 million refugees to move to places like Jordan, Iran, Egypt, Lebanon, Turkey and Gulf States.

Baucus (D-MT)
Bayh (D-IN)
Biden (D-DE)
Breaux (D-LA)
Cantwell (D-WA)
Carnahan (D-MO)
Carper (D-DE)
Cleland (D-GA)
Clinton (D-NY)
Daschle (D-SD)
Dodd (D-CT)
Dorgan (D-ND)
Edwards (D-NC)
Feinstein (D-CA)
Harkin (D-IA)
Hollings (D-SC)
Johnson (D-SD)
Kerry (D-MA)
Kohl (D-WI)
Landrieu (D-LA)
Lieberman (D-CT)
Lincoln (D-AR)
Miller (D-GA)
Nelson (D-FL)
Nelson (D-NE)
Reid (D-NV)
Rockefeller (D-WV)
Schumer (D-NY)
Torricelli (D-NJ)

I've bolded some names for ponderable emphasis.

Screenshot from icasualties.org

On Wednesday, March the 19th many of us did not mark the 5th anniversary of the war in Iraq. It was another day in which we did not remember the secrets and lies that got us into Bagdad. We don't even remember the fact that there were no weapons of mass destruction nor no Al-Qaeda to be found.

As to the Democratic Party's refusal to advance the impeachments of George Bush and Dick Cheney because it will cost them elections? Well, we already knew that the majority of Democrats aided and abetted the Bush-Cheney duo's dream of imperial power.

As long as the Democrats want to get their hands into the White House, there will always be another day to think about the death and ruin brought to this country by the war.

As has been widely noted, this past week marked the fifth anniversary of the Bush administration's unethical, immoral, and unwinnable war in Iraq. As the war enters its sixth bloody year, no end appears in sight. The fragile, fractious political situation in Iraq is no better now than it ever was. The public infrastructure is still shattered, with such basic necessities as electricity and potable water still widely unavailable in many regions of the country for more than a few hours a day. The so-called surge is stalled and its tenuous successes are failing to take hold. Everyday violence is still omnipresent, and the 3,000-year-old civilization of Iraq is still in shattered ruins. By any measure, George Bush's ill-advised Iraq adventure is an unqualified disaster.

Numerous comparisons have been made between the untenable situation in Iraq today and the equally untenable situation in Vietnam back in the 1960's. Not all of those comparisons are apt or accurate, but many of them are. America in the spring of 1968 was a very different place than it is in the spring of 2008, even though it's fundamentally unchanged in many ways today. Racial and political tensions were far higher then than they are today, with riots in the streets still in the news and bombings of banks and other public institutions still far too common for comfort. The assassinations of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy were raw wounds in the shared psyche of America in 1968. And overseas, an endless war against amorphous insurgents continued to drain the hearts and minds and blood and treasure of our nation's best and brightest for the sake of a cause that no one could satisfactorily explain at home.