Fighting them over there...

The rhetoric we hear lately from Bush and from his dead-ender supporters goes something like this, "Well, Saddam was AWFUL and you have to admit that if he were still alive things in Iraq would be at least this bad, or probably worse."

Well, first of all, no, I don't have to admit that. Because I'm absolutely certain that as bad as Saddam was, there would not be Shi'ite death squads roaming about Baghdad. There would not be 100,000 plus dead Iraqi civilians. There would not be a million plus Iraq civilians who had fled the country. And above all, if we had not invaded, there would not be 3,600 plus dead American soldiers.

Oh, and add to that death toll the 100 people who died in Kirkuk and Diyala today.

BAGHDAD, July 16 — A suicide bomber in the volatile northern city of Kirkuk on Monday crashed his truck into a compound that includes offices of a major Kurdish political party, killing 85 people. Many victims were women and children, shopping in the busy market next to the political offices, who were engulfed by a large fireball.

Hours later, the Iraqi authorities said, men wearing Iraqi military uniforms stormed into a village in Diyala Province and killed 29 men, women and children. An Iraqi security official, Col. Ragheb Radhi al-Umiri, said the gunmen surrounded the victims and fired into the crowd. The attack occurred in a remote village north of Baquba, he said, and the bodies of some victims were “desecrated” before the attackers fled.

From Bush himself we get the "we gotta fight 'em over there so we don't have to fight them over here!!" slogan, even as recently as last Thursday's presser. What we rarely get is anyone debating the appalling lack of morality (and not to mention dubious legitimacy) of a policy that calls for turning someone else's country into a hell hole in the name of our saftely.

Bad, disastrous policies have bad disastrous results. This is what they look like.

All photos: Slahaldeen Rasheed, Reuters