Reuters photo
Suffer the little children: The caption for this Reuters photo is: "An Iraqi man holds a child killed in a shooting while the family was on the way to the town of Baquba, about 50 miles north of Baghdad, [today]. Witnesses and the Iraqi police said U.S. troops opened fire on a crowded minibus north of Baghdad [today], killing five members of the same family, including two children, and wounding four others. The U.S. military said it was looking into the incident but did not confirm its involvement or provide any other details."
BushCheneyCorp, child-killers
Reports Reuters today:
U.S. troops fearing a car bomb attack fired on a crowded minivan and killed at least three civilians including a child north of Baghdad [today].
The U.S. army's 3rd Infantry Division said its troops had opened fire after first trying to wave the minivan to a stop and then firing warning shots.
"These tragedies only happen because Zarqawi and his thugs are out there driving around with car bombs," said Major Steve Warren, a spokesman for U.S. forces in Baquba, in reference to the leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.
Two men and a child were killed and three people were wounded, Warren said. Survivors disputed the military's account, insisting that five family members, including two children, died and four were wounded as bullets tore through the van.
U.S. and Iraqi authorities are investigating reports that Zarqawi was killed in a gunfight with U.S. troops in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul on Saturday, but there has been no confirmation that Iraq's most wanted militant is dead and U.S. officials said they doubted it was true.
The minivan incident highlighted the delicate balance in Iraq, where a insurgency by Sunni Arabs and foreign fighters against the Shi'ite and Kurdish-led government and its U.S. backers is intensifying in the buildup to Dec. 15 elections.
One of the survivors told Reuters the family had been driving from Balad, a town about 50 miles north of Baghdad, to Baquba for a funeral and had tried to move over to make way for a U.S. patrol when they were shot at.
Reuters television footage showed two children's bodies in a Baquba morgue and relatives kissing another body on a morgue trolley. One child's head appeared to have been blown off.
"They are all children. They are not terrorists," shouted an unidentified relative. "Look at the children," he said.
Scores of suicide car bombs have been launched at military and police checkpoints, as well as convoys and civilian targets, making soldiers wary of any vehicle.
In the past few days more than 160 people have died in a spate of suicide car bombings and other attacks across Iraq, including attacks on Shi'ite mosques in the northeast and at the funeral of a Shi'ite tribal sheikh near Baquba on Saturday....
Look how quick the U.S. military was to put a propagandistic spin on the latest deaths of Iraqi civilians at the hands of the U.S. military, with U.S. military spokesweasel Warren saying, "These tragedies only happen because Zarqawi and his thugs are out there driving around with car bombs."
If only that were all of the story.
I'm not saying that al-Zarqawi is a nice guy. From all accounts he isn't. I'm not saying that it's easy to tell which vehicle in Iraq might contain a bomb. I imagine that it often is quite difficult to tell friend from foe in Iraq, and I can only imagine what it is like for our misused* forces in Iraq to have to wonder every waking moment whether or not they might be the victim of an explosive or of another means of death or serious injury.
What I can say for sure, however, is that Iraq, prior to the Bush regime's illegal, immoral and imperialistic invasion of it in March 2003, had done absolutely nothing to the United States of America or to any of the United States' allies. It hadn't even picked on a puny neighboring nation like Kuwait. It had done nothing. Worse, it hadn't even had the capability to do anything. Worse, the members of the Bush regime knew this all along but lied through their teeth about "the smoking gun" coming in the form of "a mushroom cloud."
When you lie about the reasons for taking your nation to war, and innocent people, including children, die in your fabricated war, guess what? You are responsible for their deaths. (The White House can include this point in its Ethics 101 training that it is now making its staffers take five years too late. I will waive my consultation fee.)
So when I see pictures like the one above, I don't allow cognitive dissonance to rattle me into letting my nation off the hook. I don't think, the way our government's propagandists very apparently want us to think, "That damned al-Zarqawi!" (Funny how we Americans -- most of us, I mean -- like to think that things like terrorism and torture and oppression and election fraud and propaganda are always things that other nations commit, but not us, not God's chosen nation!) Because I'm not morally and intellectually impaired, I know that it's my country's fucking fault when our military kills children and other civilians in Iraq, and because I am a patriot and not a fucking coward -- only cowards shirk responsibility for their own or for their nation's actions -- I will fucking say it.
And I wonder which is worse: That the U.S. military is killing children in Iraq and blaming it on Bogeyman of the Week al-Zarqawi (and not on the stupid evil greedy rich white men** who, based upon their pack of bold-faced lies, put the U.S. military in Iraq in the first place), or that millions of Americans, just as their American propagandist overlords want them to, will find all kinds of interesting justifications for their nation's killing of Iraqi children -- and then wonder why they ("they" is millions, if not billions, of people all around the globe) hate us.
*The purpose of the U.S. military and its personnel is actual defense -- not to enable war profiteers to rake in their war profits through bogus wars.
**Yes, Condi is a stupid evil greedy rich white man, too.
6:49:51 PM 
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