More "Making Progress"

Sorry again for the late start--yesterday I wasn't feeling all that well and was posting from home...today was virtual server instruction (including--gasp--"cloning" virtual machines...what's next? Computers purchased strictly for...parts?)...ok, so much for the work related satire...

On the subject of work--or, should I say "hard work?"--here are two eye-opening examples of what George's hard work has produced in Mesopotamia:

BAGHDAD, Iraq - Talib Abu Younes put his lips to a glass of tap water recently and watched worms swimming in the bottom.

Electricity flickers on and off for two hours in Muthana Naim's south Baghdad home then shuts off for four in boiling July heat that shoots above 120 degrees.

Fadhel Hussein boils buckets of sewage-contaminated water from the Tigris River to wash the family's clothes.

The capital is crumbling around angry Baghdadis. Narrow concrete sewage pipes decay underground and water pipes leak out more than half the drinking water before it ever reaches a home, according to the U.S. military.

Over 18 months, American officials spent almost $2 billion to revive the capital ravaged by war and neglect, according to Army Gen. William G. Webster, who heads the 30,000 U.S. and foreign troops and 15,000 Iraqi soldiers known collectively as Task Force Baghdad. But the money goes for long-term projects that yield few visible results and for security to protect the construction sites from sabotage.

As a result, Iraqis have seen scant evidence of improvement in their homes, streets or neighborhoods. They blame American and Iraqi government corruption.

"We thank God that the air we breathe is not in the hands of the government. Otherwise they would have cut it off for a few hours each day," said Nadeem Haki, 39, an electric-goods shop owner in the upscale Karrada district in the east of the capital.

Alas, on the latter point, the air they breathe (and, by the way, the air US soldiers breathe) is contaminated by depleted uranium (courtesy of the US government). So much for any relief there.

The rest of the country also "celebrated" a milestone--Iraq is the first nation state to be placed on the endangered list by the World Monuments Fund..that's right, the entire country:

This is the first time that the Fund has ever put a whole nation on its list and so represents a singular accomplishment for the Bush administration, which knew not -- and cared less -- what it wrought...

First, there was the looting of the National Museum. That took care of some of the earliest words on clay, including, possibly, cuneiform tablets with missing parts of the epic of Gilgamesh. Soon after, the great libraries and archives of the capital went up in flames and books, letters, government documents, ancient Korans, religious manuscripts, stretching back centuries -- all those things not pressed into clay, or etched on stone, or engraved on metal, just words on that most precious and perishable of all commonplaces, paper -- vanished forever. What we're talking about, of course, is the flesh of history. And it was no less a victim of the American invasion -- of the Bush administration's lack of attention to, its lack of any sense of the value of what Iraq held (other than oil) -- than the Iraqi people. All of this has been, in that grim phrase created by the Pentagon, "collateral damage."

Worse yet, the looting of antiquity, words and objects, not only never ended but seems to have accelerated. From well organized gangs of grave robbers to American engineers building bases to American soldiers taking souvenirs, the ancient inheritance not just of Iraqis but of all of us has simply headed south. According to Reuters, more than 1,000 Iraqi objects of antiquity have been confiscated at American airports; priceless cylinder seals are evidently selling on-line at eBay for a few hundred dollars apiece; and this represents just the tiniest fraction of what's gone. The process is not only unending, but in the chaos that is America's Iraq beyond counting or assessing accurately.

Ah, eBay...where looted artifacts become an entrepreneur's stock in trade. Maybe that can be added to never ending admonitions about how we're ignoring all the newly repainted schools.

Oh, and on that note: if you ARE a soldier who's been tasked with a thankless job like repainting a school, well, don't expect any sympathy from the wingnut crowd, who will question your service record even if you've been targeted by something like and IED. I believe there's a word for describing such wingnuttery (besides wingnuttery, that is). Shameless.