Just another day in the life and death of Iraq LXIV

By Michael J.W. Stickings

You know, I don't do this series as a way of taking cheap shots at Bush and his war. Although I think Bush is to blame for how badly the war has gone -- well, Bush and those around him, those who called the shots, those like Cheney and Rumsfeld -- and although the gross mismanagement of the war and subsequent occupation has had and continues to have a direct relationship with the violence that engulfs Iraq -- a causal relationship, in fact, which is to say that the war has been waged without regard for what would happen in Iraq, and between Iraqis, post-Saddam -- there seems to me to be some value in tracking the violence and in reporting on what is really going on in that country, day after day after day. For all the discussion with respect to if and when the U.S. should withdraw its troops, for all the discussion of terrorism and foreign fighters, of Iran and Saudi Arabia, and the like, what is really going on is that people are dying, and dying violently, and doing so in huge numbers, numbers so huge as to numb us to that reality.

And so here, again, is the latest, and it comes from the north, Kurdish Iraq, Kurdistan, where the violence is increasing:

A massive truck bomb followed by two smaller blasts ravaged Kirkuk on Monday, police said, killing more than 80 people in the deadliest attack in the troubled northern Iraqi city since the war began.

The first blast, believed to be a suicide attack, tore through a commercial strip outside the office of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, the political party of Iraqi President Jalal Talabani. As residents fled the area, a car bomb exploded in the Haseer market less than a mile away, police Col. Pestton Mahmoud said.

Witnesses described seeing burning cars and charred bodies in the streets as they ran from the scene. Emergency crews and volunteers raced scores of victims to medical care, overwhelming local hospitals already teeming with hundreds of patients injured in a July 7 bombing in the nearby village of Amerli, police said.

The attacks this month are part of a pattern of increasing violence at a time of heightened tensions among ethnic Kurdish, Arab and Turkmen residents in the city and its environs.

And so it goes, as I often say in loss for better words.

And so it goes.