The Freedom March of Folly

An American Newspaper, and an influential one at that, describes just how much better we have make Clusterfuckistan. Here, within the pages of the Washington Post, is a description of the wonderful world the Bush Administration has created for them by their actions.

A bullet had burrowed a gash across Abdel-Hassan's scalp. His left arm was twisted at an angle impossible in life. Blood soaked his gray shirt; his dark blue pants were still a shade darker. With practiced routine, and barely a word, nurses rolled his corpse into the emergency room, where his name was recorded as the day's first entry in the tattered register of patients.

"Arrived deceased," it read.

"This is the grimmest shift," Luai Rubaie, a physician at the hospital, said as he settled into work. "You haven't seen anything. It's just the beginning."

He shook his head, as if uttering what was self-evident. "Day and night," he said.

Rubaie, a stocky man with a gentle face, displayed both the detachment of a physician and the anguish of a man whose country seems cursed by far too frequent deaths. Figures on civilians killed in the relentless violence in Baghdad and other restive regions are hard to come by, however. A report last month in Lancet, a British medical journal, said that at least 100,000 Iraqis may have been killed since the U.S. invasion in March 2003. A research group called Iraq Body Count put the number at a fraction of that -- probably 14,600 to 16,800.

The numbers vary widely for a reason: lack of information. The Lancet study based its numbers on a survey of 33 neighborhoods in Iraq; Iraq Body Count relies on media reports. For months, an authoritative account was provided by the Iraqi Health Ministry, but it quit publicizing the toll in the fall. It reported 3,853 civilians killed from April 5 to Oct. 5.

Rubaie knows the numbers only at Yarmouk, one of Baghdad's largest hospitals, located in a neighborhood with its own share of kidnappings, shootings, car bombings and armed clashes. He sees maybe 100 cases a day, twice as many as before the invasion in March 2003. Back then, he estimated, one in 1,000 was a victim of gunfire. Now half the cases are the consequence of the city's strife.

"It's a museeba," Rubaie said -- a disaster.

There is much more, the day to day life of physicians appreciate the killing fields of Baghdad our President's policies have unleashed and failed to control through hubris and lack of planning.