Troubled and Humble

One of his brothers was shot dead today Thursday June 1st 2006, the other was seriously wounded. He's sitting outside al-Yarmouk hospital in Baghdad. According to American news sources, the man who is the commander in chief of the armed forces occupying this boy's country and the main source of it's descent into anarchy is "troubled" and adopting a "humbler tone" Bush's change in tone did not signal a change in policies, however. He and Blair refused to set a timetable for withdrawing troops and Bush said conditions on the ground would dictate future decisions about troop levels and commitments in Iraq [snip] Bush was unusually frank in discussing his mistakes in a war that has killed more than 2,400 Americans and thousands of Iraqis, saying he regretted the "Bring 'em on" challenge he issued to Iraqi insurgents in July 2003. He said the remark was the "kind of tough talk, you know, that sent the wrong message to people." Bush also said the Abu Ghraib prison abuse scandal was "the biggest mistake" in Iraq and had fueled anti-American sentiment in the Middle East. "We've been paying for that for a long period of time," he said. This is of course the same "troubled" and"humbler Bush" who learned of Haditha from the media. No Mr. Bush your biggest mistake was believing you could launch an illegal and racist war and get away with it. And now you think that pretending to be "troubled" and "humble" and coming close to snivelling openly at the memorial day ceremony will somehow rescue you. It won't: This child is sitting in the back of a car carrying his uncle's coffin. His uncle was killed in a drive-by shooting in the Sadiyah neighborhood of Baghdad yesterday. The body is being taken away from al-Yarmouk for burial. Readers might remember hearing of al-Sadiyah, it's where some people were killed, apparently because they were wearing western dress just the other day. Tennis shorts to be precise. It's the place were Umm Saad a 70-year-old lady who ran a small grocery was killed a while back. It's the place where a family were gunned down as they fled the neighbourhood, their mistake was to make it obvious they were leaving by hiring a furniture removal van. How could this happen? Very easily - it's what always happens when a society is deliberaterly collapsed. As these children's society was collapsed, and is still being collapsed, by the government of the United States of America. At whose door should be these barbarities be laid? At the people who did the disgusting deeds? Certainly, but also at the door of the government, the breathtakingly corrupt government of the USA, headed by one George W. Bush. The government that launched an illegal racist and brutal war and is escalating its attempts to foment civil war. Whatever price Bush and his corrupt cronies have to pay, whatever retribution is exacted against them, is nothing compared to the price these childrem and their families are paying - and will continue to pay for their rest of their lives. It's nothing compared to the price that the families of US service personnel killed and wounded in Iraq are paying - and will continue to pay for their rest of their lives. "Troubled?" "Humble?" Neither of those things, simply more manoeuvring by a cynically corrupt liar heading a government of cynically corrupt liars leading a party of cynically corrupt and increasingly openly racist liars, too arrogant to realise that decent people in America and everywhere else are no longer prepared give them benefit of the doubt. What Bush is really troubled by is that it is becoming blatantly obvious even to the most naive American that the "rotten apples" aren't just the American soldiers and their terrorist blood brothers who commit attrocities that the rottenest apples of all are in the Whitehouse, the Senate, and Congress. markfromireland