Middle-Class Exodus From Iraq

'Deaths run like water through the life of the Bahjat family. Four neighbors. A barber. Three grocers. Two men who ran a currency exchange shop.

But when six armed men stormed into their sons' primary school this month, shot a guard dead, and left fliers ordering it to close, Assad Bahjat knew it was time to leave.

"The main thing now is to just get out of Iraq," said Mr. Bahjat, standing in a room heaped with suitcases and bedroom furniture in eastern Baghdad.

In the latest indication of the crushing hardships weighing on the lives of Iraqis, increasing portions of the middle class seem to be doing everything they can to leave the country. In the last 10 months, the state has issued new passports to 1.85 million Iraqis, 7 percent of the population and a quarter of the country's estimated middle class.'

That is an excerpt from the article As Death Stalks Iraq, Middle Class Exodus Begins which appeared in the New York Times today.

Written by Mona Mahmoud, Sahar Nageeb and Qais Mizher, it paints a picture that so many Americans still refuse to see: that our mission was to destroy Iraq, not save it, and we are succeeding.

Yet, don't you love it when you get an e-mail with three or four photos of U.S. service men posing with Iraqi kids who are holding signs that say things like "Thank you President Bush?"

Gee whiz. I wonder who printed those signs in English. Do you think it was those Iraqi kids who don't know English? Or could it have been staged, with the kids not even knowing what they were holding?

And don't you love how, despite all the capitalized printing about how this is "the real truth" that the "liberal" media will not print, that there is never a date given for those photos?

That's because you know they are from March 2003. Back when the kids were smiling.

And that, of course, was immediately after Saddam Hussein had been overthrown but before Iraqis realized that our "government" (read Big Oil) went in to destroy their country, not save it.

Corporate America (via BushCo) has done to Iraq what a rapist always does: beat the crap out of the victim.

I believe that when the BushCo villains are turned out of power, the subpoenas will run hot and heavy and we will uncover secrets that will make Americans' hair stand on end. Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld - and more - will be tried for treason as people of conscience inside the government risk ruin to come forth with the truth.

I believe that the American people will stop believing that corporate greed is really good for us as people - or a country - and that we will rethink our place in the world for, as Paul Krugman so aptly put it in Coming Down To Earth), we are "a nation in which people make a living by selling one another houses, and they pay for the houses with money borrowed from China."

I believe that people will stop watching American Idol and take to the streets to change the rules under which corporations operate so they are pro people instead of pro empire.

I believe that empathy will stop being a dirty word.

I believe that people in this country are going to get real very fast, rediscover that we are all in this together and do whatever it takes to create a government based upon our humanity, not our inhumanity.

Because even if a majority of us want to stick our heads in the sand and continue continue ignoring what our corporately controlled government is doing to the world and its people, Global Warming isn't going to let us.

And inexplicable things are beginning to happen.

How about Ken Lay's top lawyer (Michael Ramsey) having a heart attack and being out of the court room for a month. (This is the guy who got New York real estate heir Robert A. Durst acquitted after Durst shot and killed a neighbor, dismembered the victim's body and threw parts of it into Galveston Bay.)

Dare we think it might be his own, ignored conscience that caused that heart attack? Or that, as in the Picture of Dorian Gray the ugliness of these men must, finally, come home to roost and destroy them?

I'm a believer.