this diary is dedicated to all who suffer because of war

we love and support our troops, just as we love and support the Iraqi people – without exception, or precondition, or judgment

we have no sympathy for the devil.

we acknowledge the power to act that is in us

image and poem below the fold

A girl looks at a pool of blood at the scene of a roadside bomb attack in Baghdad, December 22, 2006. The attack wounded six people, including two policemen, police said.
REUTERS/Mohammed Ameen (IRAQ)

R.S.V.P.
by Jeanne Marie Beaumont  

The road out front is all torn up and has remained that way for a long time. One day they
tractor-pulled the trunk of a fallen tree, its roots undone by the doings. Saw crews came in and buzzed for days like a disturbed hive. I could not save the flowers. Pyramids of pipe plastic appeared overnight. Rats, unsettled, bounced across the lawns, appalling the cats. All’s ditches, trenches, ruts and pits. A week before the phones went dead, the sand trucks jilted their loads, shovels clanged, someone shouted Ho! ho! ho! like an unjollied Santa. Yellow cones mark off the area like quarantine. Red lights flash night and day. Goodness! The whole country detours around us. Each morning a colony of hardhats I observe from my upstairs window, handkerchief held to my nose, my ears stoppered with cotton and wax. Today, they were burning debris and circled the fire prodding like scouts.  I regret I cannot make the ceremony, but clearly this is a major public project with extensive resources at its disposal and certain to benefit enormous numbers. It must be.  I pray the food will last and look forward to vast and permanent improvement.

I’ve been spending some of my spare time these past few weeks rummaging around in the Whiskey Bar archives…If nothing else, the task drove home for me just how central the Iraq War has been to this blog — beginning with my very first post, which was written the day after the fall of Baghdad in April 2003.

snip

Over the past three-and-a-half years the war has come to define my thinking just as thoroughly as it has come to define Shrub’s presidency — not to mention the world we now live in.

Billmon – An Iraq Retrospective