by James Glaser
April 27, 2004

Sure we tell the world we are in Iraq to bring those people freedom and democracy, but right now the whole world knows we are bringing them death and destruction.

I don't care what the reason is or what the reasons are, by attacking cities filled with women and children, we are telling the world that those people's lives mean little to us.

In the city of Fallujah, with a peace time population count of 300,000, we can't help but kill some innocent people. Watch the fighting on the news and think about being there with your children or how about if you have your aged parents in the house. It doesn't matter if the fighting is way over on the other side of town, you have to know that rounds are falling all over that city.

Just because the insurgents want us to fight an urban war, doesn't mean we have to. There is no reason we can't surround that city and wait them out. The whole reason we are there now is because somebody killed four American civilian contractors and mutilated their bodies.

Conservative estimates say we have already killed over 175 Iraqis for each of those four Americans killed. Isn't that enough blood revenge? We are now revenging ourselves by killing kids and their mothers. Does anyone think what we are doing in Fallujah is going to bring peace and freedom to the Iraqi people?

In other cities like the holy city of Najaf, we are after a Muslim Minister we claim has an Iraqi warrant out on him for murder. Iraq doesn't even have a government yet. Right now we are waiting for the United Nations to tell us who the Iraqi government is. No I am not making that up. Still we claim some Iraqi court has issued this warrant for this Muslim Cleric by the name of Muqtada al Sadr

Sadr was a nobody, until the United States made him into a hero and now his picture is everywhere. There was even one report that American troops beat a man to death, because he would not remove the picture of Sadr that he had in his car. I don't know it the report is true, but I bet that all Iraq believes it is.

Now we are going to send 18 year old soldiers into the holiest city in Iraq to kill or arrest Sadr and we are telling these young Americans to not damage any sacred sites. We have already been warned by the Shia religious community that we should not desecrate their city, but what do we care, they are only Muslims and hey, we have this warrant so everything is legal.

Scared soldiers will destroy anything in their way if a battle breaks out. Even if we kill this Muslim Religious Cleric, we will only have turned him into a martyr or a folk hero.

We have constant battles going on in Sadr City which is a section of Baghdad, some would call it a slum. The area has over a million inhabitants and there is 80% unemployment there. These are the people that should like us the most as they hated Saddam. The city was named after the father of the Cleric we want to kill. Maqtada al Sadr stayed in that slum where his father's Mosque was and helped the poor that lived there. Those people love this guy and many of them are willing to die protecting him.

Sadr would be called a patriot here in America. He wants the American occupiers out of his country, and who can blame him? You know we would not stand for foreign troops in America killing innocent civilians or anyone else.

For the life of me, I can not understand why Washington can't see that. I can't understand why the people in Congress can't see that by killing innocent civilians in Iraq, we are losing any respect we still have in this world.

It doesn't matter that the military keeps saying that we try to avoid killing any civilians. The fact is we are killing innocent civilians and their dead bodies are shown on televisions all over the world. Not quite. Those dead bodies are not shown on American televisions, but then we are not even allowed to see the closed coffins that carry our own dead Soldiers and Marines.