Cancelled Vacations, Corpses, and Body Parts

Technorati Tags: Iraq war, Pres. Bush, Congress, cloture vote, nonbinding resolution, Harry Reid, House Majority Leader, emboldening the enemy, Iraq civil war

While our elected representatives fight about nonbinding resolutions opposing Pres. Bush's decision to send more troops to Iraq -- about how to word them; about how to debate them or whether to debate them; about how to vote on them or whether to vote on them and when to vote on them; about what precisely it means to support the troops; about whether questioning Pres. Bush's decisions emboldens the enemy; and about any number of other procedural and political issues, Iraqi women are walking up and down rows of corpses and body parts, holding portions of their male relatives' dead bodies, which they have picked up from the morgue, and trying to match the lower half or the upper half of the body they have in their possession with the other half which they are still missing but are hoping is there, somewhere among the hundreds of body parts lying in neat rows, whole corpses in one row and body parts in another.

I never thought a day would come when it was the women of the family, who would be safer on the roads. All the men are potential terrorists it seems, and are therefore to be cut down on sight. This is the logic of today, is it not? To kill evil before it even has a chance to take root.

When we got there, we were given his remains. And remains they were. From the waist down was all they could give us. “We identified him by the cell phone in his pants’ pocket. If you want the rest, you will just have to look for yourselves. We don’t know what he looks like.”

Now begins a horror that surpasses anything I could have possibly envisioned .We were led away, and before long a foul stench clogged my nose and I retched. With no more warning we came to a clearing that was probably an inside garden at one time; all round it were patios and rooms with large-pane windows to catch the evening breeze Baghdad is renowned for. But now it had become a slaughterhouse, only instead of cattle, all around were human bodies. On this side; complete bodies; on that side halves; and EVERYWHERE body parts.

We were asked what we were looking for, “ upper half” replied my companion, for I was rendered speechless. “Over there”. We looked for our boy’s broken body between tens of other boys’ remains’; with our bare hands sifting them and turning them.

We found him millennia later, took both parts home, and began the mourning ceremony.

Can Hollywood match our reality?? I doubt it.