Is this a "comma", George?

I'm still posting over at peking duck, so if you are interested in more China stories, check it out.

Horrific story about conditions for women in post-invasion Iraq:

Iraqis do not like to talk about it much, but there is an understanding of what is going on these days. If a young woman is abducted and murdered without a ransom demand, she has been kidnapped to be raped. Even those raped and released are not necessarily safe: the response of some families to finding that a woman has been raped has been to kill her.

Iraq's women are living with a fear that is increasing in line with the numbers dying violently every month. They die for being a member of the wrong sect and for helping their fellow women. They die for doing jobs that the militants have decreed that they cannot do: for working in hospitals and ministries and universities. They are murdered, too, because they are the softest targets for Iraq's criminal gangs.

Iraq's women live in terror of speaking their opinions; of going out to work; or defying the strict new prohibitions on dress and behaviour applied across Iraq by Islamist militants, both Sunni and Shia. They live in fear of their husbands, too, as women's rights have been undermined by the country's postwar constitution that has taken power from the family courts and given it to clerics.

What a horrible, sickening situation, all because of the grandiose ambitions of Bush, Cheney and the neocons. Close to 3,000 American soldiers dead, tens of thousands seriously wounded and mentally traumatized, and so many Iraqi lives lost and shattered that we can't even begin to provide a proper accounting of them.

We are covered in the blood of the dead, and it will be a very long time before this damned spot will fade and our hands will ever be clean.


UPDATE Digby reports that some 655,000 Iraqis have died as a result of the American invasion.

"Here's the smell of the blood still: all the perfumes of Arabia
Will not sweeten this little hand."