Virginia Tech and Iraq

The carnage at V-Tech is horrible! The idea that one deranged person was able to buy two guns and all that ammunition means we do need to look at our gun control in this nation. We are all grieving for the lost lives and trying to deal with it. Our news media is filled with coverage of this massacre. Listening to all these young people talk about what has happened and speak of their friends that were injured and were killed just makes you sick. The whole nation is grieving.

Now to Iraq. This just in from AP:

4 bombs kill 127 people in Baghdad
By SINAN SALAHEDDIN, Associated
Press Writer 4 minutes ago

Four large bombs exploded across Baghdad on Wednesday, killing at least 127 people and wounding scores as violence climbed toward levels seen before the U.S.-Iraqi campaign to pacify the capital began two months ago.

In the deadliest of the attacks, a parked car bomb detonated in a crowd of workers at the Sadriyah market in a mostly Shiite area of central Baghdad, killing at least 82 people and wounding 94, said Raad Muhsin, an official at Al-Kindi Hospital where the victims were taken.

A police official confirmed the toll, speaking on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to release the information.

Several cars were set afire at the market, where a car bombing in February killed 137 people. About an hour earlier, a suicide car bomber crashed into an Iraqi police checkpoint at an entrance to Sadr City, the capital's biggest Shiite Muslim neighborhood and a stronghold for the militia led by radical anti-U.S. cleric Muqtada al-Sadr.

The explosion killed at least 30 people, including five Iraqi security officers, and wounded 45, police said.

Black smoke billowed from a jumble of at least eight incinerated vehicles that were in a jam of cars stopped at the checkpoint. Bystanders scrambled over twisted metal to drag victims from the smoldering wreckage as Iraqi guards staggered around stunned.

Earlier, a parked car exploded near a private hospital in the central neighborhood of Karradah, killing 11 people and wounding 13, police said. The blast damaged the Abdul-Majid hospital and other nearby buildings.

The fourth explosion was from a bomb left on a minibus in the northwestern Risafi area, killing four people and wounding six others, police said.

Also in Baghdad, four policemen were killed Wednesday afternoon when gunmen ambushed their patrol south of the city center, police said. Six pedestrians were wounded in the gunfire.

U.S. officials had cited a slight decrease in sectarian killings in Baghdad since the U.S.-Iraqi crackdown was launched Feb. 14. But the past week has seen several spectacular attacks on the capital, including a suicide bombing inside parliament and a powerful blast that collapsed a landmark bridge across the Tigris River.

"We've seen both inspiring progress and too much evidence that we still face many grave challenges," Maj. Gen. William Caldwell, a U.S. military spokesman, told reporters Wednesday. "We've always said securing Baghdad would not be easy."

What some people don't understand, the people that started this war in Iraq and the people that want to continue this war in Iraq, is that the Iraqis live with the carnage we saw at V-Tech every day. As hard as it is for us to accept the deaths of these young people at V-Tech, the Iraqis are having to deal with it and have dealt with it for over four years. There seems to be a hypocracy, here, in the thinking and actions of these people, these chickenhawks, these war mongerers that want this Iraq war to continue.

We have a chance to change this for this war in Iraq, this occupation, must be changed. WE cannot continue in the same direction the Bush admin insists we continue to stay the course. The surge is not working! The surge will not work!

There needs to be unilateral talks with the Arab States, the UN, and everone that is and could be effected by this unrest the Bush admin has created in that area so we can control the carnage that is Iraq today. If that means talking to Iran and Syria, so be it. But not to talk will only exacerbate the problems in the middle east. I've had more than enough of this admin. Have you?

UPDATE: From the Independent, UK:

Virginia Tech, of course, is the worst incident of its kind in US history - and at one level, you would gain the impression from American television that Cho Seung-Hui has literally stopped the world.

He hasn't of course. On Tuesday, in what passes for a relatively quiet news day in Iraq, wire services reported the deaths of 56 people in violence across the country: some of them gunned down, some killed by a suicide bomber, some discovered as decomposed or decapitated corpses. But we heard not a word of that, nor of the trial in absentia in Italy of a US soldier accused of shooting dead an Italian intelligence agent, nor of the report that North Korea may be about to shut down a key nuclear reactor (which would be very big news indeed if true.) And somebody shot dead the Mayor of Nagasaki. But who cares? Instead, nothing but Virginia Tech.

Yet, however exceptional the event, there is something formulaic, even routine, about the coverage. There is no soul searching, no wondering what might be wrong with a society where such things happen so frequently. You hear no new arguments, for deep down there is nothing new to be said.

No detail of the tragedy is too tiny to recount; from where Cho went to high school to the thoughts of the postman who delivered mail, to where the family lived in the Virginia suburb of Centreville (and never met him). Yet America is showing scant sign of addressing the far bigger issue - of whether it is finally time to get serious about gun control.