Abeer -- crushed like an empty can

Take a good look at the picture to the right, her name is Abeer Qasim Hamza al Janabi.

Look into her eyes, eyes which never saw her sixteenth birthday.

Some things do not lend themselves well to satire, only to rage.

This is one of them.

Stalked for a week by American soldiers who grabbed her and stripped her, they emptied Abeer of her innocence as casually as they might chug-a-lug a beer. Finished with her nakedness, they crushed the can, poured kerosene on her belly and desecrated innocence and threw a careless match.

Iraq is not Vietnam – Vietnam was quagmire.

Iraq is quicksand and Haditha was not Iraq’s “My Lai”.

If by the comparison one means the turning point, the place where the last illusion of morality falls away like a filthy scab -- it was in that farmhouse in Mahmudiyah, where Abeer was born – and snuffed.

If the atrocity dies the media death one can almost predict, our national conscience, as we continue to struggle in the quicksand, will sink deeper along with my pride in being an American and with what moral authority we still had as a democratic republic.

The last thing we will see will be an outstretched forefinger and then the lights will go out.

I apologize to James Raven for snatching the picture from his post and what was probably the best line in his Mother of All Rants.

By all means please go read Riverbend’s essay. Riverbend is a young Iraqi woman who has been posting from Baghdad since before Mr. Codpiece set sail on the good ship, Insanity.

I close this post with the closing lines from my previous post on this subject:

Burn in hell Mr. Green!

Burn in hell Mr. Codpiece!