Original artwork of the Iraq War drawn uncoached and unsolicited by my 8-year-old nephew.
While we have a moment inbetween the Michael Jackson trial and the American Idol finalé, and while there currently seems to be no White Women In Peril™ or new incidents of Meth Mouth to report on, let’s take a moment to see what’s going on in our Iraquagmire…
HABAN, Iraq, May 11 — The explosion enveloped the armored vehicle in flames, sending orange balls of fire bubbling above the trees along the Euphrates River near the Syrian border.
Among the four Marines killed and 10 wounded when an explosive device erupted under their Amtrac on Wednesday were the last battle-ready members of a squad that four days earlier had battled foreign fighters holed up in a house in the town of Ubaydi. In that fight, two squad members were killed and five were wounded.
In 96 hours of fighting and ambushes in far western Iraq, the squad had ceased to be.
Every member of the squad — one of three that make up the 1st Platoon of Lima Company, 3rd Battalion, 25th Regiment — had been killed or wounded, Marines here said. All told, the 1st Platoon — which Hurley commands — had sustained 60 percent casualties, demolishing it as a fighting force.
I guess all those Bush supporters washed the purple ink off of their fingers, aren’t praying hard enough, or have put too few yellow ribbon magnets on their SUV’s. Get to work, folks!
In the course of the day: Four car bombs detonated in Baghdad; a man wearing explosives at an army recruitment center in Hawija, north of Baghdad, blew himself and many others up; a car bomb exploded in a marketplace in Tikrit, north of Baghdad; and the country’s largest fertilizer plant was heavily damaged by a bomb in the usually quiet southern city of Basra. Meanwhile, U.S. Marines were winding up a remarkable pitched battle against surprisingly well-equipped and determined insurgents on Iraq’s western border. Some 76 Iraqis were reported killed and more than 120 wounded in the one day of violence.
With security experts reporting that no major road in the country was safe to travel, some Iraq specialists speculated that the Sunni insurgency was effectively encircling the capital and trying to cut it off from the north, south and west, where there are entrenched Sunni communities. East of Baghdad is a mostly unpopulated desert bordering on Iran.
“It’s just political rhetoric to say we are not in a civil war. We’ve been in a civil war for a long time,” said Pat Lang, the former top Middle East intelligence official at the Pentagon.
But, but, but… Mission Accomplished! Transfer of Sovereignty! Iraqi Elections! Flowering Democracy and all that!
The Grim Reaper is watching our little Iraquagmire, licking his chops, just waiting for it to grow to Vietnam proportions. We’re just one successful domestic terrorism catastrophe, one invasion of Syria, or one bombing of Iran away from starting another long black wall memorial.
