I’ve been checking the incredible Baghdad Burning blog produced by Riverbend, a courageous Iraqi woman who has been blogging from the heart of Baghdad since the war began. I hadn’t seen anything there since early June and with all the killings in Baghdad and her relatively high profile I worry when she doesn’t post anything for an extended period of time. Through all the hassles with limited electricity, violence in the streets, random searches and the general security breakdown she manages to continue to post her thoughts with grace, compassion and wit. But thankfully she now has a new post up on her blog and it is a window into the world we are creating in Iraq for her and her fellow Iraqis.

I’ve long marveled at her ability to separate Americans, even American soldiers, from American government policy and to treat all of us with respect, but with the way things are going in Iraq it doesn’t suprise me that even Riverbend has limits. She’s long mocked the puppet government we installed in Iraq, in all its incarnations, and ridiculed the absurdities and criminalities of the bush gang, but the recent gang rape of a 14 year-old Iraqi girl, her subsequent killing and the murder of her family, along with the resulting coverup, have driven any pity she may have felt for our military right out the window.

In the news they’re estimating her age to be around 24, but Iraqis from the area say she was only 14. Fourteen. Imagine your 14-year-old sister or your 14-year-old daughter. Imagine her being gang-raped by a group of psychopaths and then the girl was killed and her body burned to cover up the rape. Finally, her parents and her five-year-old sister were also killed. Hail the American heroes… Raise your heads high supporters of the ‘liberation’ - your troops have made you proud today. I don’t believe the troops should be tried in American courts. I believe they should be handed over to the people in the area and only then will justice be properly served. And our ass of a PM, Nouri Al-Maliki, is requesting an ‘independent investigation’, ensconced safely in his American guarded compound because it wasn’t his daughter or sister who was raped, probably tortured and killed. His family is abroad safe from the hands of furious Iraqis and psychotic American troops.

It fills me with rage to hear about it and read about it. The pity I once had for foreign troops in Iraq is gone. It’s been eradicated by the atrocities in Abu Ghraib, the deaths in Haditha and the latest news of rapes and killings. I look at them in their armored vehicles and to be honest- I can’t bring myself to care whether they are 19 or 39. I can’t bring myself to care if they make it back home alive. I can’t bring myself to care anymore about the wife or parents or children they left behind. I can’t bring myself to care because it’s difficult to see beyond the horrors. I look at them and wonder just how many innocents they killed and how many more they’ll kill before they go home. How many more young Iraqi girls will they rape?

These are the seeds we are sowing in Iraq. When next you hear bush or rummie or papa-cheney ramble on about how we are enlightening the Middle East, bringing hope of democracy and freedom to Iraqis, think of Riverbend and all those like her in Iraq who really wanted to give us the benefit of the doubt, and realize that what she describes in her post is what we’ve really brought them, terror on a grand scale, fear for their very existence as human beings, and the clear message that they and all their countrymen and women are expendable in the furtherance of whatever psychotic grand plan our administration is hatching in their part of the world.