Sunday, July 23, 2006

If it's not bakers in Iraq...

...For the past year, Sunni Arab militants have swept through their old neighborhood, a heavily Sunni district in northwest Baghdad that borders a Shiite area, forcing Shiites out of their homes and shutting their shops by killing customers and workers inside. One after another, bakeries, whose workers are overwhelmingly poor and Shiite like Mr. Aaraji, began to close.

Now, out of 11 bakeries in the area, northern Ghazaliya, just one, the Sunni-owned Al Obeidi on Center Street, remains open....


...or doctors...

...Adel Abdel-Mohsin, the Deputy Health Minister, told The Times that 190 medical staff had been murdered and 400 doctors kidnapped and that 1,000 doctors had fled the country....

...it's garbage collectors:

...Many of the roadside bombs in Baghdad ... are hidden in garbage piles....

Which makes the job of garbage collection extremely dangerous -- in the last year 350 garbage collectors have been killed.... Some of the collectors have died by inadvertently setting off bombs as they scoop up piles of waste. Others are shot by the insurgents for informing the police when they find a device. Now there are some neighborhoods where garbage collectors will simply not go to work, because insurgents will shoot at them to prevent them clearing the streets at all....


And yet the civilian leadership of the most militarily powerful nation on earth has no plan to deal with any of this except more of the same.

Forget us war critics -- why is this considered acceptable by supporters of the war?

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