Another fine mess

June 18, 2007 10:39 PM

More nightmares in Iraq: Abuse in an orphanage, Baghdad has turned a “war zone”, photographers don’t want to go back, 4MM displaced
posted by growabrain (24 comments total)

Alternative link to the orphanage story here
posted by growabrain at 10:45 PM on June 18, 2007

So sad :(
posted by amyms at 11:23 PM on June 18, 2007

Displaced Iraqi shiites could always cross into Iran & hang out with all the displaced Afghans, sipping tea & playing dominoes, or something.
posted by UbuRoivas at 11:32 PM on June 18, 2007

Terry Gross interviews Gilbertson on her NPR show Fresh Air.
posted by sunexplodes at 12:31 AM on June 19, 2007

News from Iraq are going the way of the Israel-Palestine conflict: non-news. Stuff like this, gruesome though it may be, is so obvious, so expected on a daily basis that one stops paying any attention to it in the end. I know I have.
posted by lifeless at 12:56 AM on June 19, 2007

Wow it almost seems like the sanctions, invasion and occupation has failed.

It's good that you've stopped paying attention lifeless, last thing you'd want to be doing is paying attention.

I believe Paris Hilton was released for a party.
posted by mattoxic at 3:50 AM on June 19, 2007

A lot of the photographers are absolutely fearless (the immensely talented James Nachtwey springs to mind)... if they don't want to go back, that spells O-H S-H-I-T-!
posted by chuckdarwin at 4:04 AM on June 19, 2007

lifeless: that's exactly why you will never see a front page like this.

eponytragic.
posted by UbuRoivas at 4:21 AM on June 19, 2007 [2 favorites]

Heart-breaking story about the orphanage.

Fred Halliday's latest at openDemocracy says the intervention in Iraq "set in train six major processes, which will take years to work themselves through:
* the wholesale discrediting of the US, its allies, particularly Britain, and any campaign for the promotion of democracy in the Arab world
* the unleashing across the middle east, and more broadly within the Muslim world, of a revitalised militant Islamism, inspired if not organised by al-Qaida, which has used the Iraq war greatly to strengthen and internationalise its appeal
* the shattering of the power and authority of the Iraqi state, built by the British and later hardened by the Ba'athists and the fragmentation of Iraq into separate, antagonistic, ethnic and religious zones
* the explosion, for the first time in modern history, of internecine war between Sunni and Shi'a in Iraq, a trend that reverberates in other states of mixed confessional composition
* the alienation of all sectors of Turkish politics from the west and the stimulation of an authoritarian nationalism there of a kind not seen since the 1920s
* the fomenting, albeit in slow motion and with some constraints, of a new regional rivalry, between two groupings: Iran and its allies (including Syria, Hizbollah and Hamas), versus Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Jordan - a rivalry made all the more ominous and contagious by Iran's pursuit of nuclear weapons."
posted by Abiezer at 4:53 AM on June 19, 2007

Yes, Abs, but apart from that I thought it went pretty well.
posted by Wolof at 5:00 AM on June 19, 2007 [1 favorite]

Yes. The mission was accomplished, for a start.
posted by UbuRoivas at 5:06 AM on June 19, 2007

(abs? isn't "abbo" the expected nickname?)
posted by UbuRoivas at 5:07 AM on June 19, 2007

Those photos are intresting. So many of the pictures we get back from iraq are all "artistic", well framed, well lit, etc. And usually without corpses. It's good to see some more 'normal' photographs from average Iraqis.
posted by delmoi at 5:45 AM on June 19, 2007 [1 favorite]

Holy shit:

I didn’t have a picture from this embed yet, and out of sheer desperation I asked permission to walk around with the engineers. The GIs told me that I was an idiot; I could get killed out there, but it was my life. I hopped out, ran over to one of soldiers, and started taking pictures, dancing around him the whole time so snipers wouldn’t consider me an easy target. I got his unit—“18th engineers, 3rd (Stryker) brigade, 2nd I.D.,” my notebook reads—his surname (Gardner) from his flak jacket, his rank (sergeant) from a patch on his chest, and ran back to the truck. I just wanted to be back behind the armor of the Humvee. Another engineer was shouting at him, “Get off the sidewalk.” They were frightened of bombs buried beneath it

I was back inside the Humvee lighting a cigarette to calm my nerves when a massive concussion shook our truck. It was an IED. All I could see was a huge cloud of dust. The gunner made the only sound, a ratchet-click of the spinning turret, while he searched for the man who triggered the bomb. Then the radio squawked, “Gardner is fucked up! Get a CASEVAC! Gardner is fucked up!” Gardner had been split in two by the bomb.

From the "Don't want to go back" link.
posted by delmoi at 6:04 AM on June 19, 2007

Yes. The mission was accomplished, for a start.

I see that US troops are launching a major offensive outside Baghdad. I think President Bush should fly out to an aircraft carrier and say major combat operations have started again and in the Battle of Iraq the United States and our allies haven't exactly prevailed.
posted by kirkaracha at 6:39 AM on June 19, 2007 [1 favorite]

The islamism in tue
"* the alienation of all sectors of Turkish politics from the west and the stimulation of an authoritarian nationalism there of a kind not seen since the 1920s"

I'm intrigued by that. Non-national-Islamism is on the rise in turkey, and it's primarily becuase of the inefficiency of the state in providing a welfare state/jobs. The islamism in turley appears to dress itself in the mantle of economic progress: a mantle that appears to fit relative to the hidebound turkish govt.
posted by lalochezia at 6:57 AM on June 19, 2007

kirkaracha, I'm sure he'll get right on that. Sometime.... about.... erm, never.

[cool link]
posted by chuckdarwin at 7:00 AM on June 19, 2007

Here I am, Internet Evangelist for VQR, but too full of respect for MeFi to pimp us here, and growabrain is doing it for me. That's just teh awesome.

(But the article, the "don't want to go back" one, is awesome.)
posted by waldo at 7:07 AM on June 19, 2007

Just read the "don't want to go back" one and am too depressed to read the others just now.

The lieutenant later explained his unwillingness to send in US troops. “There’s no reason to die over a body that’s already dead,” he told me. “Especially, an American life. We just got too much stuff to go back to.”

Man, I wish he'd stopped before getting to the "Especially" part. Up to there, I was agreeing with him.
posted by languagehat at 7:55 AM on June 19, 2007

.
posted by Smedleyman at 9:12 AM on June 19, 2007

"There's no reason to die over a body that's already dead."

Isn't that a quote from Catch-22? If it isn't, it should've been.
posted by blucevalo at 10:46 AM on June 19, 2007 [1 favorite]

Iraqi Political Refugee Facing Deportation To Iraq
posted by homunculus at 12:11 PM on June 22, 2007

Everyone we fight in Iraq is now "al-Qaida"
posted by homunculus at 2:21 PM on June 25, 2007

Iraqi Youth Face Lasting Scars of War: Conflict's Psychological Impact on Children Is Immense, Experts Say
posted by homunculus at 5:03 PM on June 26, 2007