Green Zone too unsafe for Bush....

...On Wednesday, assassins killed a bodyguard of Iraq's parliament speaker one day after a bomb exploded in the hot-tempered politician's motorcade as it drove into a parking lot inside the Green Zone.

The bomb attack on the motorcade of Speaker Mahmoud al-Mashhadani, a hard-line Sunni Arab nationalist reviled by many Shiites, was a major security breach in the heavily guarded compound that houses the U.S. and British embassies and the Iraqi government. It was also the fourth assassination attempt against a high-ranking Iraqi government official in recent days. [emphasis mine]

So Bush is planning to meet with Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Malik in Jordan instead of Baghdad next week. That is, unless al-Malik backs out due to threats from radical Shiites to boycott parliament if he goes.

I can't believe that the mainstream media is still quibbling over whether or not Iraq is engaged in a "civil war." Look at this (from the same story as above):

BAGHDAD, Iraq - At least 101 Iraqis died in the country's unending sectarian slaughter Wednesday, and the U.N. reported that 3,709 Iraqi civilians were killed in October, the highest monthly toll of the war and one that is sure to be eclipsed when November's dead are counted.

The United Nations Assistance Mission for Iraq also said citizens were fleeing the country at a pace of 100,000 each month, and that at least 1.6 million Iraqis have left since the war began in March 2003.

Life for Iraqis, especially in Baghdad and cities and towns in the center of the country, has become increasingly untenable. Many schools failed to open at all in September, and professionals — especially professors, physicians, politicians and journalists — are falling to sectarian killers at a stunning pace.

Lynchings have been reported as Sunnis and Shiites conduct a merciless campaign of revenge killings. Some Shiite residents in the north Baghdad neighborhood of Hurriyah claim that militiamen and death squads are holding Sunni captives in warehouses, then slaughtering them at the funerals of Shiites killed in the tit-for-tat murders.

Wednesday's death count included 76 bodies found dumped in four cities, 59 of them in Baghdad alone, according to police, who said at least 25 people had been gunned down.

The U.N. figure for the number of killings in October was more than three times the 1,216 tabulated by The Associated Press and nearly 850 more than the 2,867 U.S. service members who have died during the war. [emphasis mine]

Words fail me. I simply cannot express how horrified and sickened I am at what the country of my birth has wrought in Iraq.

In October when I visited my dad in California, I was reminded how luxurious life in the US is. How easy it can be there. How incredibly abundant and cheap material goods are! Walk into the Vons near my dad's house and you're greeted with an array of fresh fruits and vegetables, meats, canned goods, drugs, alcohol, sweets, magazines, deli items, household products, electrical gadgets, etc, etc! Unimaginable almost anywhere else in the world. And that's a small Vons, by local standards!

Most Americans don't think twice about all that abundance. They rumble from place to place in their obscenely huge trucks and SUVs, oblivious or not giving a damn that the flip side of their carelessly lavish lifestyle is Iraq, Afghanistan, Mexico and other poverty-stricken, subjugated areas of the world that supply the cheap oil and cheaper labor to sustain them in the lap of ignorant luxury.

As much as I miss the ease and comfort of So Cal, the trade-off--supporting the horror in Iraq with my taxes in order to experience the luxuries of empire--isn't worth it to me. I'm grateful I have the option of Ireland. Where, to be fair, life is quite comfy by the standards of most of the world.

But it's a far cry from life in Cali.

News story here.