Death throes, or Ladies and Gentlemen, here’s what we get for our $2,000,000,000 a year

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An Iraqi blogger named Fayed started his blog a few months ago because he was tired of hearing all the negative things about the war and wanted to, as the song goes, accentuate the positive. The name of his blog is Healing Iraq.

Fayed has since emigrated to Jordan (along with 500,000 other Iraqis). Why would this man leave his beloved country?

He blogged this a few months ago.

Please don’t ask me whether I believe Iraq is on the verge of civil war yet or not. I have never experienced a civil war before, only regular ones. All I see is that both sides are engaged in tit-for-tat lynchings and summary executions. I see governmental forces openly taking sides or stepping aside. I see an occupation force that is clueless about what is going on in the country. I see politicians that distrust each other and continue to flame the situation for their own personal interests. I see Islamic clerics delivering fiery sermons against each other, then smile and hug each other at the end of the day in staged PR stunts. I see the country breaking into pieces. The frontlines between different districts of Baghdad are already clearly demarked and ready for the battle. I was stopped in my own neighbourhood yesterday by a watch team and questioned where I live and what I was doing in that area. I see other people curiously staring in each other’s faces on the street. I see hundreds of people disappearing in the middle of the night and their corpses surfacing next day with electric drill holes in them. I see people blown up to smithereens because a brainwashed virgin seeker targeted a crowded market or café. I see all that and more.

Don’t you dare chastise me for writing about what I see in my country.

This is from a more recent blog right before he left for Jordan.

The instructions vary between neighbourhoods. Amiriya and Ghazaliya have the full menu, while others stress only 2 or more of them. So far, enforcing the hijab for women and a ban on shorts for men are consistent in most districts of western Baghdad. In other areas, women are not allowed to drive, to go out without a chaperone, and to use cell phones in public; men are not allowed to dress in jeans, shave their beards, wear goatees, put styling hair gel, or to wear necklaces; it is forbidden to sell ice, to sell cigarettes at street stands, to sell Iranian merchandise, to sell newspapers, and to sell ring tones, CDs, and DVDs. Butchers are not allowed to slaughter during certain religious anniversaries. Municipality workers will be killed if they try to collect garbage from certain areas. Private neighbourhood generators are banned in a few areas. And the last I heard is that they are threatening Internet cafés and wireless providers.

This is not the talk of some couch-ridden anti-war got-it-soft liberal American.

In other parts of my blog (and many other blogs) we debate federal funding for embyronic stem cell research. One of the chief reasons for opposing this research is that the ‘opposers’ don’t want federal funds being used to support research that is morally repugnant and that destroys what they consider to be human life.

Do we really want more American dollars, and much more importantly, more American lives, to be sacrificed and spent for what Iraq has become?

ht: NRO (and that’s not The Nation or the Progressive)

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