Accidental Blogger

I was not surprised to hear Pres.Bush citing two bloggers from Baghdad yesterday as evidence of normalcy returning to Baghdad to the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association. Though incompetent in most other respects,this administration has been most adept at inserting cherry-picked phrases into speeches. To go by those carefully selected words, you would think all is normal on the streets of Baghdad, which are safe enough for Americans to walk on, as echoed by Sen.John McCain on The Situation Room. The actual lines from the Iraqi bloggers in a March 02, 2007 post below:

While many Iraqi families are returning to the homes they once were
forced to leave, there are also Baghdadis who are reopening their
stores, ending the months they spent out of business because of
violence and intimidation. Some streets that were virtually deserted a
few months ago are slowly showing signs of returning to life.

The
reopening stores even include some liquor shops! There are two stores
on one street that I used to shop that closed early last year when
their owners received death threats from the insurgents and the
militias. Yesterday I walked through that street and, to my amazement,
I found both stores open and back in business.

This, right below a pretty picture of a shelf stacked with liquor bottles. Progress indeed!

So, what is the truth? Is it that Baghdad will return to peace and
prosperity (or at least the Green Zone) without a huge infusion of
fresh troops, just because the warring factions decided to scale back
their violence, or will the arrival of more troops simply coincide with
a downswing in the violence, enough to conveniently claim that the
Surge is successful?  Yet this post from the same blog a few days ago
underscores the hollowness of claims of normalcy returning to Baghdad.

I and the dozens of drivers around me were expecting traffic to reopen
at any minute but then happened what we didn’t expect; a massive
explosion rocked the area and huge plumes of smoke rose high in the sky.
It took more than a few seconds to collect my thoughts realize what happened…looks like we just had a controlled detonation.

The
smoke obscured the scene that it took another minute till I could see
where the smoke was coming from. It was the beautiful building of the
finance ministry.

Here is another brush with death, this time from a young girl writing from somewhere in Iraq, around March 08, 2007.

BOOOM , heavy explosion (a fuel tank full with explosives exploded near
my house) , my ears were closed !2 seconds later BOOOM again, mama ran
and shouted "Mariam" , I was panicked , there was thick smoke
everywhere , I shouted while I was running I wanted to reach Miriam :"
something fall on our house", " mariam , where are you " I stopped for
a while to have a look, the windows were broken , and the glass was
falling down on me , I started to cry and shouting "Mariam" , I turned
and saw black smoke and blaze I realized that the explosion wasn’t
inside the house , I entered the house , everyone was alive !!!!! a
true miracle.

Two
blogs, two different viewpoints of the same horrendous situation. The
first one, generated by a couple of Iraqi dentists who have even met
Pres.Bush in 2004, lionizing the Iraq war and reeking of fear of the
enemy, whom they largely identify as Al-Quaida, perhaps too perfectly
in line with the administration’s assertion that Iraq is overrun by
‘terrists’ who need to be fought there so we can drive our cars in
peace. The second, a loss of a girlhood spent in dodging bombs in your
own home, instead of living in peace with nothing more to worry about
than your school exams or what to wear to a party.