The Nation: The Normalcy of Fear

The Normalcy of Fear
Rachel Corbett & Anja Tranovich
Mon Mar 20, 2:41 PM ET

The Nation -- Three years ago this month, Vivian Salim Mati drove with her family from their Baghdad home toward the airport highway to escape a bombing raid. As they were leaving the city, an American tank fired on them without warning. Mati recalls seeing the soldier shooting bullets from the top of the tank. Within moments, her husband, her two sons, her daughter and her mother-in-law were shot dead in the car. Mati received neither explanation from occupation forces nor compensation for her loss.

Earlier this year Mati decided to join a delegation of Iraqi women to visit the United States and recount her experiences in the war. Mati traveled the dangerous route from Baghdad to Amman, Jordan, to obtain her US visa. However, her visa was denied on the grounds that she might overstay her visit because she lacked "sufficient family ties that would compel her to return" to Iraq. Her fellow delegates, who recounted this story, felt it especially grievous that the US government cited Mati's lack of family--deaths for which America was responsible--to explain why she could not enter the country.

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Al-Araji explained that her frustration with this chaos motivated her to come to the United States: "We can't instigate change inside our own country. Listen to the irony in this story: We have to come to Washington and talk to the people there to change the situation in Iraq. The decision-makers are here." The Iraqi peace delegation, composed of human-rights activists, doctors and engineers, say they had tried to advocate for policy change in Iraq. Some had taken documentation of rights abuses to the Ministry of Human Rights and asked about detainees, but got no results.

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While the Code Pink delegation scrambled to get members of Congress to agree to meetings on International Women's Day, a delegation of female Iraqi and Afghan officials hand-picked by the US State Department and sympathetic to the Bush Administration, were given both an official welcome by the President Bush and opportunities to meet with lawmakers. But conspicuously absent in Bush's speech to the Iraqi and Afghan officials were any citations of improvement in the life of Iraqi women.

Just a normal day...tank explosion, people killed (my paraphrasing)

He did call it a "normal day".

:wtf: is up with the apathy about so many people being killed daily that the numbers in the thousands just keeps going up?

His comment was a blatant slap in the face to those who protest this war.