So Bush & Co. Calls This Winning?

Salient points in the Associated Press news story, “Blackwater Resumes Guarding U.S. Envoys in Iraq” by Andrew Kramer, in this morning’s New York Times: 1. “American diplomats on Friday resumed travel in convoys escorted by Blackwater USA, the private American security contractor, three days after the Iraqi government banned the company following a shooting in which at least eight Iraqis were killed.” 2. ”American Embassy officials have declined to give details of an investigation of the shooting on Sunday in Baghdad’s Nisour Square, but a preliminary report by Iraqi officials found that Blackwater guards had fired at Iraqis in their cars without provocation...The ministry concluded that the shooting had begun when a Blackwater guard fired at a car that did not stop quickly enough, killing the driver, a passenger and a baby.” 3. “Violence continued to displace Iraqis. Between 50 and 100 Sunni families fled their homes in the Baghdad neighborhood of Washash around midnight on Friday after being threatened by members of the Mahdi Army, a Shiite militia, according to an Interior Ministry official.” 4. “After a senior leader of the Mahdi Army was killed in an ambush several hours earlier, militiamen began moving through the area with loudspeakers, telling people to leave, said Sheik Abu Hasan, one of those displaced. American forces came to the area, he said. Though they did not stop the flight, they helped the families reach the Sunni Arab neighborhood of Adel in safety. The ministry official said that four Sunni women from the neighborhood were killed... ‘We had no other choice but to leave our houses at once,’ Sheik Abu Hasan said. ‘What shocked us a lot was that as soon as we reached the main streets, we saw Iraqi and American forces who were showing and directing us to the highway.’ 5. “Also on Friday, in a sign of mounting turmoil amid Shiite groups in the south, two aides to Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the most revered Shiite cleric, were assassinated in Basra and Diwaniya, in the latest of a string of attacks on the cleric’s followers.” And, if the above is proof that the Bush administration not only is making progress in Iraq but that the Bush administration’s policies in Iraq will eventually win the war, one has a couple questions: 1. Why are there so many American diplomats in Iraq that they travel in fucking CONVOYS protected by Blackwater USA hoodlums? 2. Why are the lives of American diplomats more important than the lives of Iraqis that the Bush administration claims to be bringing freedom and democracy to? 3. If there is no civil war in Iraq, how come Shiites are fighting Sunnis, Sunnis are fighting Shiites, US soldiers are helping Iraqis flee the country and Blackwater mercenaries are keeping order by murdering anyone who gets in the way of American diplomats? 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. WHY ARE THE LIVES OF AMERICAN DIPLOMATS SO MUCH MORE IMPORTANT THAN THE LIVES OF IRAQIS THAT BLACKWATER HOODLUMS ARE PAID $1000 PER DAY TO MURDER IRAQIS WHO GET IN THEIR WAY?