It is strange how in Iraq slaughter soon seems to be part of normal life

[cal04]

It is strange how in Iraq slaughter soon seems to be part of normal life
A special dispatch by Patrick Cockburn on his journey through a country being torn apart by civil war

Iraq is rending itself apart. The signs of collapse are everywhere. In Baghdad, the police often pick up more than 100 tortured and mutilated bodies in a single day. Government ministries make war on each other.

(snip)
It is getting worse. The Iraqi army and police are not loyal to the state. If the US army decides to confront the Shia militias it could well find Shia military units from the Iraqi army cutting the main American supply route between Kuwait and Baghdad. One convoy was recently stopped at a supposedly fake police checkpoint near the Kuwait border and four American security men and an Austrian taken away.


The US and British position in Iraq is far more of a house built on sand than is realised in Washington or London, despite the disasters of the past three-and-a-half years. George Bush and Tony Blair show a unique inability to learn from their mistakes, largely because they do not want to admit having committed any errors in the first place.

Civil war is raging across central Iraq, home to a third of the country's 27 million people. As Shia and Sunni flee each other's neighbourhoods, Iraq is turning into a country of refugees.

http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/article2021233.ece

[Redstone]

1. Because it's not reported on the FRONT pages of our newspapers.

It gets buried about page three or four among the ads.

Redstone