It's been almost two months since Riverbend has posted. Since she lives in Baghdad, there is always concern for her safety.

End of Another Year...
by Riverbend

Here we come to the end of 2006 and I am sad. Not simply sad for the state of the country, but for the state of our humanity, as Iraqis. We've all lost some of the compassion and civility that I felt made us special four years ago. I take myself as an example. Nearly four years ago, I cringed every time I heard about the death of an American soldier. They were occupiers, but they were humans also and the knowledge that they were being killed in my country gave me sleepless nights. Never mind they crossed oceans to attack the country, I actually felt for them. Had I not chronicled those feelings of agitation in this very blog, I wouldn't believe them now. Today, they simply represent numbers. 3000 Americans dead over nearly four years? Really? That's the number of dead Iraqis in less than a month. The Americans had families? Too bad. So do we. So do the corpses in the streets and the ones waiting for identification in the morgue. Is the American soldier that died today in Anbar more important than a cousin I have who was shot last month on the night of his engagement to a woman he's wanted to marry for the last six years? I don't think so. Just because Americans die in smaller numbers, it doesn't make them more significant, does it?

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Just because Americans die in smaller numbers, it doesn't make them more significant, does it?Sistani foils the occupiers' plot (again)
by Helena Cobban

So now, it appears that not only has Ayatollah Sistani blocked the Bushists' plan to cut off and isolate Moqtada al-Sadr-- but also, the main Shiite party the Bushists were hoping would help them in their plan, SCIRI, has started distancing itself rapidly from it, too... AP's Qassim Abdul-Zahra is quoting Shiite parliamentarians visiting Najaf as saying that an aide to Ayatollah Sistani today said that Sistani "does not support" a US-instigated plan to construct a new governing coalition that would exclude and isolate Sadr.

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What has long been a catastrophic tragedy is also now a horrific farce

Iraq - which for years has been an unmitigated tragedy - has turned into Grand Guignol, and, true to the traditions of that genre, horror and farce combine in equal measure. No doubt we should rejoice that al-Jamiat police station in Basra has been destroyed and its prisoners taken to the relative security of a compound in which detainees are hopefully not routinely tortured. But if a sick satire on an obscure television channel included a sketch about British troops attacking a unit of the police that they established and with whom they had been theoretically working for nearly four years, the outcry would not have been limited to complaints about undermining the morale of our troops under fire. We would have been told that the whole idea was too fantastical to sustain the lampoon. But that is what really happened on Monday, and although the sound of the exploding bar-mines should presumably be music to the ears of everyone who supports the rule of law, a number of important questions lie unanswered in the rubble of what was, until Christmas morning, the headquarters of the Basra serious crimes unit. A witty military press officer suggested that the name related to what the 400 associated police officers did rather than what they prevented. But he did not make clear how long the British authorities have known that, among their regular activities, they crushed prisoners' hands and feet, electrocuted them and burned them with cigarettes. You will recall that one of the reasons given to justify the invasion and occupation of Iraq was the obligation to save the people from that sort of atrocity. It now appears that, at least in al-Jamiat police station, the arrival of what is bravely described as democracy has not made much difference.

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Rather See the Whole Thing..."

"He is now caught between admitting the war was a mistake and his policy has failed, or trying to tough it out," said Joseph Cirincione, a foreign policy analyst at the Center for American Progress, a liberal Washington think tank. "It looks like the president would rather let the whole operation go down in flames than admit he was wrong." Reuters Bullheaded. That is the characteristic described above. Persistence and tenacity can be virtues but an unwillingness to adjust to a realization of failed planning and execution is mere stubbornness. Iraq is not the place Mr. Bush was told that it was. The various Iraqi peoples are not the peoples he was told that they were. The Middle Eastern region is not, etc...

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Top Ten Myths about Iraq 2006
by Juan Cole

1. Myth number one is that the United States "can still win" in Iraq. Of course, the truth of this statement, frequently still made by William Kristol and other Neoconservatives, depends on what "winning" means. But if it means the establishment of a stable, pro-American, anti-Iranian government with an effective and even-handed army and police force in the near or even medium term, then the assertion is frankly ridiculous. The Iraqi "government" is barely functioning. The parliament was not able to meet in December because it could not attain a quorum. Many key Iraqi politicians live most of the time in London, and much of parliament is frequently abroad. Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki does not control large swathes of the country, and could give few orders that had any chance of being obeyed. The US military cannot shore up this government, even with an extra division, because the government is divided against itself. Most of the major parties trying to craft legislation are also linked to militias on the streets who are killing one another. It is over with. Iraq is in for years of heavy political violence of a sort that no foreign military force can hope to stop. The United States cannot "win" in the sense defined above. It cannot. And the blindly arrogant assumption that it can win is calculated to get more tens of thousands of Iraqis killed and more thousands of American soldiers and Marines badly wounded or killed. Moreover, since Iraq is coming apart at the seams under the impact of our presence there, there is a real danger that we will radically destabilize it and the whole oil-producing Gulf if we try to stay longer.

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What About the Iraqis?

Sometimes there is nothing more gripping than the mundane. Consider "Baghdad Burning," the on-line diary of a young Baghdad woman who goes by the pseudonym of Riverbend. Her story begins in the summer of 2003, almost five months after the American invasion, and by the end of the book version, compiled here in two volumes, she has provided us with the most comprehensive Iraqi view of the war to date. In one entry she describes her tragicomic efforts to battle boredom as she accompanies her brother and cousin on a mission to fill up the family car at the local gas station. (She gives up, she tells us, after the first six hours; the two young men will be forced to stay for another seven.) She documents shopping expeditions on which she takes note of the growing number of women who are covering themselves in hijab, or catalogs the travails involved in coping with daily power outages, such as setting up a bucket brigade to fill the family's rooftop water tank. She offers a primer on how to react when you notice that soldiers are cordoning off your street: My aunt went into a tirade against raids, troops, and looting, then calmed down and decided that she wouldn't hide her gold tonight: her daughter and I would wear it. I stood there with my mouth hanging open—who is to stop anyone from taking it off of us? Was she crazy? No, she wasn't crazy. We would wear the necklaces, tucking them in under our shirts and the rest would go in our pockets.... We went on with our usual evening activities—well, almost. My aunt wanted to bathe, but was worried they'd suddenly decide to raid us while she was in the bathroom. In the end, she decided that she would bathe, but that E. would have to stand on the roof, diligently watching the road, and the moment an armored car or tank found itself on our street, he'd have to give the warning so my aunt would have time to dress.... Here we were, 10 p.m., no electricity and all fully clothed because no one wanted to be caught in a raid in their pajamas. I haven't worn pajamas for the last...6 months.

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