Burning

Go read a blog written by a real young woman, using the pseudonym "Riverbend" to protect herself and her family, Baghdad Burning. She only posts a couple times a month but has a collection of her first year blogging out in book form. Here's a taste:

It's like Baghdad is no longer one city, it's a dozen different smaller cities each infected with its own form of violence. It's gotten so that I dread sleeping because the morning always brings so much bad news. The television shows the images and the radio stations broadcast it. The newspapers show images of corpses and angry words jump out at you from their pages, "civil war...death..killing..bombing...rape..."

Rape. The latest of American atrocities. Though it's not really the latest- it's just the one that's being publicized the most. The poor girl Abeer was neither the first to be raped by American troops, nor will she be the last. The only reason this rape was brought to light and publicized is that her whole immediate family were killed along with her. Rape is a taboo subject in Iraq. Families don't report rapes here, they avenge them. We've been hearing whisperings about rapes in American-controlled prisons and during sieges of towns like Haditha and Samarra for the last three years. The naivete of Americans who can't believe their 'heroes' are committing such atrocities is ridiculous. Who ever heard of an occupying army committing rape??? You raped the country, why not the people?

I wrote about the pillage problem a recently, and the worst part is that while the overwhelming majority of U.S. soldiers I read about are deserving of the highest respect, it makes out legitimacy irrecoverable.

Riverbend seems driven to write today in reaction to the murder of her friend, his death a strange result of the inability of the U.S. occupying force to provide common electrical service:

At nearly 2 pm, we received some terrible news. We lost a good friend in the killings. T. was a 26-year-old civil engineer who worked with a group of friends in a consultancy bureau in Jadriya. The last time I saw him was a week ago. He had stopped by the house to tell us his sister was engaged and he'd brought along with him pictures of latest project he was working on- a half-collapsed school building outside of Baghdad.

He usually left the house at 7 am to avoid the morning traffic jams and the heat. Yesterday, he decided to stay at home because he'd promised his mother he would bring Abu Kamal by the house to fix the generator which had suddenly died on them the night before. His parents say that T. was making his way out of the area on foot when the attack occurred and he got two bullets to the head. His brother could only identify him by the blood-stained t-shirt he was wearing.

When I read something like this, real people that are hurt because of our actions, or the war begun by our quasi-elected leaders in our name, I could care less about Joe Lieberman's precious ego or any other politician. Harold Meyerson is the first mainstream media columnist to get it right:

No great mystery enshrouds the challenge to Lieberman, nor is the campaign of his challenger, Ned Lamont, a jihad of crazed nit-pickers. Lieberman has simply and rightly been caught up in the fundamental dynamics of Politics 2006, in which Democrats are doing their damnedest to unseat all the president's enablers in this year's elections. As well, Lieberman's broader politics are at odds with those of his fellow Northeastern Democrats. He is not being opposed because he doesn't reflect the views of his Democratic constituents 100 percent of the time. He is being opposed because he leads causes many of them find repugnant.

Read the rest to see how deluded or self-deluded Lieberman is on Iraq, and the other issue Bush is planning to bring back like a zombie next year, gutting Social Security.

I'm not sure that any callow politician coming into office this year on an anti-Bush enablement platform is going to have the solution for our repugnant war crisis, but it sure as hell seems there absolutely has to be a change for anything better to happen.

Is that same feeling sweeping enough of the U.S.A. to make a difference?

Does it matter even if they fix the vote?