"I have been covering the war in Iraq ever since it began three years ago and I have never seen the situation so grim. More than a week ago, I was in the northern city of Mosul, protected by 3,000 Kurdish soldiers, but even so it was considered too dangerous to send out patrols in daytime. It is safer at night because of a curfew."
"I was in Lebanon at the start of the civil war in 1975. Baghdad today resembles Beirut then. People are being murdered solely because of their religious identity. A friend called to say he had a problem because his two half brothers had been born in Fallujah, the Sunni Muslim stronghold, and this was on their identity cards. If they were picked up by Shiite militiamen, a glance at their place of birth alone could get them killed."
And the conclusion of his piece:
"Three years ago, when Saddam's statue was toppled, Iraqis were promised their lives would get better. Instead Iraq has become the most dangerous place in the world."
When the nightly news in the U.S. begins to frame the news from Iraq as coming from the site of a civil war, only then will the American public begin to understand the full brunt of the cost that this escapade has incurred to both countries. The canard that President Bush often repeated, "We're fighting them over there so we don't have to face them here," is a falacy of epic proportions. Over top of that falacious reasoning, it carries the logic of, "We'll raze your country to buy an ounce of security for ours."
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