Not just another bombing...

This is terrible.

BAGHDAD, Feb. 23 -- A wave of sectarian strife and recrimination swept Iraq Thursday after Wednesday's bombing of a revered Shiite shrine in the city of Samarra. The Interior Ministry said that more than 100 people have been killed in the violence.

Officials in Baghdad, struggling to restore order, expanded an existing curfew in an effort to get people off the streets after dark and canceled all leaves for Iraqi security forces.

The process of forming a new government also appeared to be in jeopardy, as some Sunni politicians, protesting what they said was a lack of protection for Sunni mosques attacked overnight, said they were pulling out of negotiations with Shiite parties.

There were a great number of disturbances reported across the country Wednesday night and Thursday, too many to accurately track let alone verify.

In four separate areas around Baghdad, authorities found the bodies of 40 men shot dead, an Interior Ministry spokesman said Thursday.
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All told, Interior Ministry officials said more than 100 people were killed.
The Muslim Scholars Association in Iraq said 168 Sunni mosques were attacked in the last 24 hours.

"I understand the consternation and concern of Iraqi Shias when they see this most holy site wantonly destroyed," President Bush told reporters Thursday, praising those in Iraq who have called for calm.
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The stress created an even more difficult climate for the political process, in which minority Sunnis, majority Shiites and Kurds are struggling to put together a new government.
Tariq al-Hashemi of the Iraq Accordance Front, the main Sunni Muslim bloc, said his group has decided "to suspend negotiations over forming a new government." The group also boycotted a meeting of reconciliation set for Thursday with President Jalal Talabani.
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The upsurge in violence followed Wednesday's attack in which bombers blasted the gilded dome of the Askariya shrine in Samarra into naked steel and gaping blue sky in a provocative assault that roused tens of thousands of Iraqi Shiites into angry protests and deadly clashes.

Though no casualties were reported in the blast, the bombing was the most destructive attack on a major shrine since the U.S. invasion, and Iraqi leaders said it was meant to draw Iraq's majority population of Shiites and the minority of Sunnis into war. "This is as 9/11 in the United States," said Adel Abdul Mahdi, a Shiite and one of Iraq's two vice presidents.
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Wednesday, after the mosque bombing, President Bush, as well as top U.S. military and civilian representatives here, appealed for calm. He repeated that appeal Thursday

"I appreciate very much the leaders from all aspects of Iraqi society that have stood up and urged for there to be calm. . . . The voices of reason from all aspects of Iraqi life understand that this bombing is intended to create civil strife, that the act was an evil act. The destruction of a holy site is a political act intending to create strife," Bush said.
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In Baghdad, Shiite boys and men abruptly abandoned classrooms, homes and jobs to muster outside the headquarters of the influential Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr in the heart of Sadr City, the slum named for the cleric's father.

"This is a day we will never forget," said Naseer Sabah, 24, who had left his job at a pastry factory without changing clothes to join the black-clad Shiite militia fighters clutching pistols, Kalashnikov assault rifles and grenade launchers outside Sadr's headquarters.

Thousands converged on the Sadr offices, on foot or in buses and pickup trucks packed with armed men hanging out the windows.

"We await the orders of our preachers," teenagers around Sabah cried.

"We are the soldiers of the clerics," Shiite protesters chanted in Karrada, another of Baghdad's Shiite neighborhoods. Demonstrators there shouted a warning to their enemies: "If they are up to it, let them face us."

Other protests were reported in the predominantly Shiite cities of Najaf, Karbala, Basra and elsewhere.

Sunni political leaders said retaliatory attacks hit more than 20 Sunni mosques across Iraq with bombs, gunfire or arson. Authorities reported at least 18 people killed in the aftermath, including two Sunni clerics. In one incident, in Basra in southern Iraq, police said gunmen in police uniforms broke into a jail, seized 12 Sunni men and later killed them, according to the Reuters news agency.

Many of Baghdad's millions shuttered shops and left work early, rushing home to tense neighborhoods where gunfire rang out overnight. In one neighborhood, families lay on the floors of their houses to evade bullets as militiamen loyal to Sadr confronted Iraqi troops backed by U.S. military helicopters outside a Sunni site.
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Early in the last century, Shiite faithful paid to cloak the mosque's graceful, onion-shaped dome in gleaming gold. On Wednesday, every vestige of the dome was destroyed, the tiled and gilt facade stripped down to mud brick.

Police said two bombs that had been planted at the mosque overnight exploded at dawn. Some local officials in Samarra said the bombers were dressed in the uniforms of Iraqi security forces.
Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jafari, in one of several televised news conferences and appeals by Iraqi and U.S. leaders, said preliminary investigation into the bombing pointed to "infiltration" of Iraqi security forces.
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There was no immediate assertion of responsibility for Wednesday's attack. Mowaffak al-Rubaie, Iraq's national security adviser, told al-Arabiya television that he believed Abu Musab al-Zarqawi's al-Qaeda in Iraq organization may have been the culprit. "The main aim of these terrorist groups is to drag Iraq into a civil war," Rubaie said.

"Violence will only contribute to what the terrorists sought to achieve by this act," Bush said in a written statement in Washington. "I ask all Iraqis to exercise restraint in the wake of this tragedy."

U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad and Army Gen. George W. Casey Jr., the American military commander in Iraq, issued a joint statement calling this a "critical moment" for Iraq. The top U.N. envoy here, Ashraf Qazi, said he would ask the country's political and religious leaders to hold a dialogue under the auspices of the United Nations, which has taken a back seat to the United States in the conflict.

Iraq's most influential Shiite religious leader, Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, called on Shiites to take to the streets, but peacefully. Sistani, who avoids the news media, allowed himself to be shown on television consulting on Wednesday's crisis with the country's other leading Shiite ayatollahs. His unprecedented appearance with the three other clerics underscored the gravity with which they viewed the near-destruction of their shrine.
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In Sadr City, representatives of Sadr called for restraint and sought to deflect blame from Iraq's Sunnis. Followers came running late Wednesday when a Sadr preacher took up a bullhorn outside Sadr's offices to give the direction that the armed, angry crowds were waiting for. The mosque attack was the work of "occupiers," or Americans, "and Zionists," said the cleric, Abdul Zara Saidy. In Iran, Shiite leaders echoed the accusation. (my bold)

God, so much to say here. O.K. first, this is just awful, and it proves the Congressman Jack Murtha was right. Iraq is headed to a civil war. We cannot stop it. It is going to happen whether we are in the country or not. So now what to?

We can either triple the amount of troops or we can get out of there. But, as is seen above, even though the US was not responsible, we are still being blamed. We're the "occupiers" who will be stuck in the crosshairs of this upcoming civil war. We don't have even close to enough troops to stop this civil war and Bush knows it.

For Bush to call this violence a political act is true, but it is a hauntingly ironic thing for him to say considering this whole war was a predetermined political act of sheer recklessness and a complete abuse of his posistion.

Also, Bush has some fucking balls saying "Violence will only contribute to what the terrorists sought to achieve by this act."

Yeah, no shit. But apply "9-11" to "this act" and "invading Iraq" to "violence will only contribute to what terrorist sought to achieve" and you are damn right. Can anyone honestly say that Osama Bin Laden isn't licking his chops right now?

Also, Bill Press is right.

As of right now, we have 2,284 U.S. soldiers dead and 17,430 casulties. Since the moral crusaders at the Pentagon have not counted the dead Iraqis, that number (around 30,000) is just an estimate. And it has cost a whopping $243 billion and counting.

For WHAT?????

Well, apparently to cause a civil war, to do everything Bin Laden said we would do, to bankrupt our kids, to kill and injure our own, to kill tens of thousands of innocent people, to run various torture facilities around the world, and, overall, to make us less safe.

And if you think we're spreading freedom and its all going to be an easy six month campaign of roses and candy and it is only going to cost $1.7 billion, than you are not only A) a member of the Bush administration, B) on LSD, but C) you also need to watch Frontline's "The Insurgency." Watch that, read the Washington Post article, read what Jack Murtha has been saying for months, and then if you still think we can win over there, enlist. If not, call you member of congress and tell them to do as much as they can to get our guys out of there.