Violence in Iraq Continues to Increase

More and worse violence in Iraq.

Juan Cole has all the details you can stomach -- including this horrifying statistic:

Al-Sharq al-Awsat says that Raja' al-Khuza'i, a secular Shiite woman physician and the head of the National Council for Iraqi women, announced Thursday that Iraqi women are subjected to increasing violence and that 3,000 become widows each month. Al-Kuza'i served on the Interim Governing Council during the tenure of US proconsul Paul Bremer and had fought against the imposition of religious law on Iraq's women. Speaking in Vienna, al-Khuza'i said that a large number of female activists had been assassinated, along with large numbers of school teachers, female physicians, and woman police officers. She said the 100 new widows every day were often left with no means of supporting themselves and their children.

The link is in Arabic; here is a (very) rough translation. It's pretty clunky, but at least you'll get an idea.

The Jawa Report blames Nancy Pelosi for the Thanksgiving weekend massacres:

After the Democrats won in November, I wondered just how long it would take for their influence to see real world results.
[...]
Contrary to the Lefties argument that our presence in Iraq creates more violence, the terrorist's morale and appetite for the blood of innocents has only been heightened by the anticipation of a US withdrawal promised by Nancy Pelosi.

Good job Democrats. You've really turned things around for Iraq.

Let's see if I have this straight. Before November 7, the terrorists were upping the violence in an attempt to scare Americans into voting for the Democrats. (Glenn Greenwald has a good round-up of this argument.) Now that the election is over, the Democrats are still to blame for the ever-increasing violence. Because the terrorists are celebrating? Who knows? And if the Democrats had lost the election, the explanation for these two days of the worst violence Iraq has seen since 2003 would have been that the terrorists were angry at the Republican win, and were engaged in a desperate effort to make Americans regret having voted for the Republicans and to influence them to pressure the Republicans into leaving Iraq.

There is always a way, if one is determined to reject accountability, to blame others for your own failed policies.