Bodies pile up in Iraq morgue as murder rate soars

[NNN0LHI]

http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/5013439.htm

BAGHDAD, Aug 28 (Reuters) - Grieving women wailed and beat their heads at the back door of the Baghdad coroner's office on Thursday, waiting for the bodies of their murdered loved ones to be released for burial.

At regular intervals, the blue metal door creaked open and another corpse was handed over to be laid in one of the rough wooden coffins strapped to the roofs of waiting taxis.

Inside, amid the stench of death, coroners worked flat out, their daily caseload more than tripled by postwar Iraq's violent crime wave. snip

Most of the bodies had gunshot wounds in a city where law and order has broken down and automatic rifles or pistols are must-have items in nearly every household.

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[wtmusic]

1. The week of May 1st

the murder rate was 6x what it was before the war, and it can only be worse now.

[zekeson]

2. The only positive I recall reading about Saddam

was that through fear, presitige, intimidation, whatever, he managed to keep a nation made up of many rival factions in a relative calm state. That is not an endorsement of him, but it is to say that you might think that someone should have considered that dynamic before we went in to "liberate" those folks.

[NNN0LHI]

3. Juniors Daddy understood that dynamic very well

That was one of the reasons given for not going into Baghdad in 1991 after the old man invaded Iraq up to the "Welcome To Baghdad" signs and stopped and then turned around. Same reason why old man Bush did nothing to interfere as Saddams army quelled uprisings in northern, and southern Iraq, using helicopters in the US no fly zones which created the mass graves Junior is digging up today. Yes, he knew.

Don

[mikeytherat]

5. Straight from the mouth of George H. W. Bush (BushDaddy):

"Trying to eliminate Saddam, extending the ground war into an occupation of Iraq, would have violated our guideline about not changing objectives in midstream, engaging in "mission creep" and would have incurred incalculable human and political costs. Apprehending him was probably impossible. We had been unable to find Noriega in Panama which we knew intimately. We would have been forced to occupy Baghdad and, in effect, rule Iraq. The coalition would instantly have collapsed, the Arabs deserting it in anger and other allies pulling out as well. Under those circumstances, there was no viable "exit strategy" we could see, violating another of our principles. Further more, we had been self-consciously trying to set a pattern for handling aggression in the post-Cold War world. Going in and occupying Iraq, thus unilaterally exceeding the United Nations' mandate, would have destroyed the precedent of international response to aggression that we hoped to establish. Had we gone the invasion route, the United States could conceivably still be an occupying power in bitterly hostile land. It would have been a dramatically different -- and perhaps barren -- outcome."

-- George H.W. Bush in his book A World Transformed, page 489

mikey_the_rat

[rock]

6. That's right. It's the fact that somebody was in control

Obviously poopypants bush*sucks is not.

[Spentastic]

4. Wait a minute

I thought if everyone had guns criminals would never hurt anyone?