Baghdad Central Morgue Report For May

Photo by Franco Pagetti for Time magazine

The Baghdad Central Morgue set a new one-month record in May when it processed 1,375 bodies, a goodly number of them victims of assassinations and mass executions by warring sectarian factions that now control much of the city.

The previous record of 1,091 bodies was set in April and the May number was double that in May 2005.

Says Andrew Sullivan at The Daily Dish:

This isn't spin. There's no data as hard as corpses. And by that measure, Baghdad is half as secure as it was a year ago. Rumsfeld's strategy has unleashed spiraling anarchy.

Meanwhile, several Iraqi blogs are reporting that a big joint Iraq-U.S. security crackdown is imminent and both Sunni insurgents and Shiite militias will be the targets. Does that mean June be yet another record setter at the morgue?

HELL ON EARTH

Meanwhile, if you didn't stop by Kiko's House earlier in the week and really want to get a case of the ass, check out my Monday post on Ten Lessons of the Haditha Massacre.

David Ignatius of The Washington Post echoes many my thoughts in an op-ed piece:

This is an Iraqi nightmare, and America seems powerless to stop it. What would you think if you were the parent of one of those dead Iraqi children [who were dragged from a school bus and killed]? You would want the United States, the nation that broke the fragile bonds that once held Iraq together, to act more effectively to control this violence. And you would want Iraq's so-called government of national unity to behave like one and stop the killers who are devouring the decent people of Iraq. And if neither the Americans nor the Iraqi government could protect your children, you would turn to the militias.

WORN OUT PRIORITIES

Pamela Hess of United Press International reports the latest outrage from a White House that still is not dealing forthrightly with important issue of worn out and obsolete military equipment:

When the Senate took $1.9 billion out of the war supplemental to fund border security last month, $1.6 billion came out of funds to replace equipment destroyed or worn out from four years of combat in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The money was diverted at the behest of the White House in a last-minute bid to address growing political unrest about illegal immigration. The Office of Management and Budget championed the change without input from the Army or the Marine Corps whose budgets were sliced, a Pentagon budget official told United Press International last week.

I thought that the American people were supposed to be making sacrifices, not the troopers down at the Green Zone motor pool.

(Hat tip to Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo)

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Meanwhile, if you didn't stop by Kiko's House earlier in the week and really want to get a case of the ass, check out my Monday post on Ten Lessons of the Haditha Massacre.