From the NYT

Explosion Kills 20 in Baghdad Book Market
Khalid Mohammed/Associated Press

By EDWARD WONG AND KIRK SEMPLE
Published: March 5, 2007

BAGHDAD, Monday, March 5 — A suicide bomber detonated a car full of explosives in the historic booksellers’ district of Baghdad today, killing at least 20 people and injuring 65 others, police officials said.

The bombing followed the opening of a new stage in the intensified security plan for the capital, where more than 1,100 American and Iraqi soldiers moved on Sunday into Sadr City, a stronghold of Iraq’s largest Shiite militia...

-------------------------

Gus: the continuing carnage unleashed by the US invading Iraq has surpassed a hundred fold whatever a Saddam would dream of in a lifetime, even in his most brutal ways. Some people respected him, some people feared him for good reasons but there was still an Iraqi ideal that helped people live their lives, cross the sectarian borders without fear, intermarrying for love rather than take up hate across the street:

---------------

In Baghdad, Sectarian Lines Too Deadly to Cross
Robert Nickelsberg/Getty Images, for The New York Times

By DAMIEN CAVE
Published: March 4, 2007

BAGHDAD, March 3 — After centuries full of vibrant interaction, of marrying, sharing and selling across sects and classes, Baghdad has become a capital of corrosive and violent borderlines. Streets never crossed. Conversations never started. Doors never entered.

Sunnis and Shiites in many professions now interact almost exclusively with colleagues of the same sect. Sunnis say they are afraid to visit hospitals because Shiites loyal to the cleric Moktada al-Sadr run the Health Ministry, while Shiite laborers who used to climb into the back of pickup trucks for work across the Tigris River in Sunni western Baghdad now take jobs only near home.

--------------------

Gus: The US war on Iraq has wounded far more people that it care to count, physically, mentally and philosophically. And about two million people have been displaced.

Did we tell the sabre-rattling Wankees that this was going to be the result of their follies!!!! Yes we did. Letters, emails, pigeons (I hyperbolate here with the pigeons) to the US president and his deputy sheriff, a little man representing the US in Orstralya, Johnnee. We wrote to newspapers, we held rallies that stopped cities. But the newspapers and their headmaster Johnnee wanted blood.

Did we know that the WMDs scarecrow were a crock!!! Yes we did and claimed so from our rooftops till our voice got hoarse — and not only that, we shouted  that should the world desire a peaceful "regime change" in Iraq, war was not the answer. 

The US and their acolytes wanted to conquer Iraq and they did. They wanted to conquer oil (at the time under the trading influence of Europe and Russia) and wanted to maintain the master of the oil universe, the US dollar, that was beginning to lose a tiny bit of prestige in this part of the world in favour of the Euro. 

Lots of lives have been lost just for that. By March 6th 2007 one can estimate within a 4 per cent margin of error that 700,000 lives (including US soldiers) have been lost as a direct result of this war-for-oil folly.

May peace be with the souls of the dead and may peace be with the souls of the next victims in this deliberately started tragedy — inflicted by a cabal of nasty sadists scrooges and profiteers who profess to be saints.