The two years of weeping for Iraq

By Rabah al-Jaafar

Azzaman, June 16, 2005

When his troops invaded Iraq two years ago, President Bush promised his guns would turn into ploughs to cultivate our land, his warplanes into doves of peace and his Abraham tanks, Humvees and Bradelys into flocks of sheep.

But after two years, our harvest of Mr. Bush’s promises has been nothing but tragedies, calamities and disappointments.

Our children still dream of candy and cookies which they can nowhere find.

We are even denied the opportunity of proper burial for our beloved ones who regularly fall due to bullets that stream from snipers of U.S. Marine Corps.

Our gardens have turned into cemeteries and our mosques into graveyards. Our dead are buried without white shrouds and prayers.

Mr. Bush and his marines have turned us into a nation of weepers. Even the path to the cemetery for proper burials his troops have blocked.

And they have made us see with our naked eyes hundreds of thousands of our compatriots turning into refugees in their own country.

Iraqis fleeing their cities without belongings or mattresses for fear of indiscriminate and excessive use of unproportional force by the marines towards camps of internal exile are now everywhere.

Iraqis now die twice, Mr. Bush: Once while they are still alive and once when they cease to live.

In the two years since the U.S. invasion we have seen nothing of your promises.

Instead we have seen wave after wave of liquidations, assassinations, car bombs, brutality, torture and destruction.

Our prisons are crammed with thousands of detainees. The sanctity of our mosques is violated and our holy book desecrated.

You have given us two long years of weeping, Mr. Bush, but the tragedy is you refuse to hear our cries.

Link Here