This is Riverbend’s last post, but I sincerely hope not her final post. She’s been an incredible source of information from inside Baghdad, from inside an Iraqi family struggling with the transition from Saddam Hussein to a life under oppressive occupation, from relative freedom from religious strife and freedom for women to bitter civil war based on sectarian allegiances and the desire for religious domination. She is a Sunni Arab in a Shi’ite controlled city, a westernized Arab woman in a country now dominated by fundamentalist clerics and their sects of rabid followers, she is outspoken in her criticism of the Americans, the violence, the Iraq puppet regime (as she calls it) in a country intolerant of independent and outspoken women. And we haven’t heard a thing from her since that ominous last post.

I fear for her safety, I fear for her family, and I fear that her voice has been forever stilled.

Let it not be so.

Other bloggers are beginning to notice. I e-mailed John Amato of Crooks and Liars the other day and he hadn’t heard and has been too buried in current American scandals to really take it on. The Smirking Chimp has made note of it as has Booman Tribune, but not much else from bloggers understandably swept up in the crimes, lies, coverups and scandals besetting our own country on the verge of an important mid-term election.

But it matters. In a sense America and George Bush created Riverbend. She’d likely still be doing her computer tech work had we not invaded. She’d have electricity and water and be free to walk the streets had we not invaded. She would have no incentive to publish a blog for Americans about her life in Baghdad because there would be no interest here in reading it except for some intellectual curiousity among scholars studying life in a secular Arabic nation.

But none of that happened.

We happened.

And I hope to hell it hasn’t cost her and her family their lives.