The Most Dangerous Days
William Rivers Pitt
Wednesday 01 March 2006
The Neil Cavuto show on FOX, of course, was able to locate a bright silver lining in the carnage. The show carried an onscreen caption that read, "All-Out Civil War in Iraq: Could It Be a Good Thing?"
Hmm.
Wednesday opened with a string of bombings in Baghdad that killed at least 26 people and wounded 65 others. Tuesday saw 75 more people killed in another series of bombings, the worst being five explosions in Baghdad. Since the bombing last Wednesday of the gold-domed Askariya shrine, sacred to Shi'ite Muslims, more than 1,400 people have been killed in Iraq. Bush officials in Iraq and here in America have been scrambling to slap a smiley-face on these horrors, but the threat of all-out religious civil war looms larger by the hour.
There were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, no connections to al Qaeda or 9/11. The deep sense of betrayal felt within the populace is very real, and very dangerous to congressional Republicans staring down the barrel of the midterm elections that are nine months away. Patience and perseverance? Been there, done that, got the t-shirt.