Yet Another Depressing Post on Iraq

The Iraqi Parliament is cracking up:

The largest Sunni Arab bloc in the Iraqi parliament said on Sunday it would boycott the fledgling legislature to protest the kidnapping of a colleague, at a time when the prime minister is pushing a reconciliation plan aimed at bringing religious sects together and lessening the daily violence.

The decision by the Sunni Accord Front, which holds 44 seats in the 275-member parliament, threatens to pull the legislature apart. The announcement came a day after legislator Tayseer Mashhadani and seven of her bodyguards were abducted in broad daylight on a busy street in a predominantly Shiite Muslim neighborhood of Baghdad. One of the leaders of the Accord Front, Adnan Dulaimi, said the Sunni parliament members would not participate in the legislature until Mashhadani was released.

When sectarian militias are not disarmed and allowed to flourish, you're going to get kidnappings and revenge killings and mass ethnic cleansing. Having armed camps based along religious lines is necessarily the ingredients of a civil war. The Parliament could make whatever laws they want and show up for work every day and shake hands with one another, but until the militias get under control, it really doesn't matter. Further, this meaningless Parliament isn't even able to stay collegial. And the reconciliation plan the Prime Minister is pushing appears DOA:

Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki last month called for Sunni Arab insurgent groups to lay down their arms and asked them to return to the political fold. On Saturday, a truck bomb killed at least 66 people in a busy market in the heart of a Shiite neighborhood in Baghdad, the deadliest attack since the government took power in May.

"The major factions have refused this initiative and are not interested in it," said Hussein Falluji, a Sunni lawmaker. "This reconciliation plan is only in the prime minister's mind. It was born dead."

Of course, what the role of the US military can be in a civil war remains unclear, other than siding with one faction over the other. This frustration over the lack of a defined mission and the difficulty in determining the enemy ALWAYS lead to events like this:

A 21-year-old former soldier has been arrested in Marion, North Carolina, and charged with killing four Iraqi civilians in March, when he was serving in Iraq.

Steven D. Green, who had been stationed in Fort Campbell, Kentucky, with the 101st Airborne Division, was taken into custody Friday evening, the Army said Monday in a news release.

He is charged with killing an Iraqi man, two women and a girl, as well as raping one of the females, according to U.S. Attorney David L. Huber of the Western District of Kentucky and FBI Special Agent in Charge Tracy Reinhold of Louisville, Kentucky.

All accounts from the DoJ and military officials indicate that this was premeditated rape and murder, where the GIs went to the girl's house with specific intentions and malice aforethought. This was not a case of mistaken identity; the girl would pass by the checkpoint where these soldiers were stationed all the time, attracting their attention. According to this article (via quinn) she was 15 years old (the military initially put her age at 20).

Fifteen-year-old Abeer Qasim Hamza was afraid, her mother confided in a neighbor.

Abeer told her mother again and again in her last days that the soldiers had made advances toward her, a neighbor, Omar Janabi, said this weekend, recounting a conversation he said he had with the girl's mother, Fakhriyah, on March 10.

Fakhriyah feared that the Americans might come for her daughter at night, at their home. She asked her neighbor if Abeer might sleep at his house, with the women there.

Janabi said he agreed.

Then, "I tried to reassure her, remove some of her fear," Janabi said. "I told her, the Americans would not do such a thing."

Abeer did not live to take up the offer of shelter.

Instead, attackers came to the girl's house the next day, apparently separating Abeer from her mother, father and young sister.

Janabi and others knowledgeable about the incident said they believed that the attackers raped Abeer in another room. Medical officials who handled the bodies also said the girl had been raped, but they did not elaborate.

I cannot throw this completely on the mission; these are cold-blooded killers. The details in this article are devastating. but the lack of a mission, the idleness, in the heat, the strain that war puts on you (one of these GIs was later dismissed from the Army for a "personality disorder"), makes the likelihood of something horrific like this happening that much greater.

Rape is a very serious crime in the Middle East. Juan Cole says that "the story is so explosive that most Iraqi newspapers have declined to report it." No doubt nudged in that direction by the Pentagon. We've really left a part of ourselves on this battlefield, a part of our humanity. I feel pain for everyone caught up in this nonsensical, assinine war, who are still there because a small man in Washington can't abide admitting a mistake. Waving the white flag? No, we're waving the flag of sanity. The one that stipulates that sending tens of thousands to their deaths so you can look like a tough guy defies all known logic, and is in fact criminal.