Riverbend is alive and well and now in Syria, having successfully escaped the surging hell that was her home city in Baghdad. She’s been offline for about 4 months since announcing that they would be leaving Iraq and her latest entry explains the difficulties they encountered in just getting a ride, let alone getting out of the country.

How is it that a border no one can see or touch stands between car bombs, militias, death squads and… peace, safety? It’s difficult to believe- even now. I sit here and write this and wonder why I can’t hear the explosions.

I wonder at how the windows don’t rattle as the planes pass overhead. I’m trying to rid myself of the expectation that armed people in black will break through the door and into our lives. I’m trying to let my eyes grow accustomed to streets free of road blocks, hummers and pictures of Muqtada and the rest…

How is it that all of this lies a short car ride away?

How is it indeed? And how is it that our Dear Leader cannot understand that simple fact, that getting out is so much better than staying with the bullets and the bombs and the death squads? That our very presence has robbed Iraqis of those very simple human realities as safety in one’s person and the comfort of friends and neighbors and a functioning infrastructure and the realities of daily life?

We have robbed these good people of so much and all because Bush apparently bought into the Vietnam rhetoric of “we had to destroy the village in order to save it” so much that he escalated it to “we had to destroy the nation in order to save it”.