The final humiliation

Keren-Maliki

Maliki's Basra Security Initiative Fails
25 Bodies Found in Baghdad, Basra

Al-Zaman/ AFP say that a firestorm of protest is building in Iraq over the alleged rape and killing of a 15 year old Iraqi girl in Mahmudiyah, and the murder of her family, by a US GI. MP Safiyah Suhail, a woman representative from the National Iraqi List in parliament, demanded that PM Nuri al-Maliki and Interior Minister Jawad al-Bulani present themselves to parliament for questioning in the matter. She demanded that the Iraqi government be involved in the investigation. She said that this was a matter that touched on the honor of the Iraqi nation and the female MPs had a special role to play in demanding an accounting.

Suhail is former ambassador to Egypt of the new Iraqi government and stood against the imposition of Islamic law on Iraqi women. That a secular person is so stirred up about this suggests to you what the Sunni and Shiite fundamentalists are thinking. For most Iraqis, honor is bound up in the chastity of their women, at least in public, and a foreigner raping an Iraqi girl is a profound humiliation for the entire country. This matter is not going to go away quietly and if the Bush administration thinks it is just a matter of disciplining unruly troops, it has another think coming. Entire colonial empires have been shaken by such incidents in the past.

A passage to Iraq, anyone?

Well, I think the two dead troopers who were multilated are a hint at what the boys think. They waited for months, set a clever trap, kidnapped, tortured in a medieval fashion and after they finally killed these kids, mined their bodies in the hope the rest of the platoon would grab the bodies and blow up.

In WWII, they hung American soldiers accused of rape, even on flimsy pretexts, especially if they were black. The rape-murder of an Iraqi girl is just too much to accept. It proves Sadr right as rain, again, and probably for the final time.

And like nothing else, it makes the Iraqi government look very weak