Day by day the situation gets worse in Bagdad (and probably much of the rest of Iraq). As reported by BBC News:

The International Red Cross has urged US forces to restore the Iraqi capital’s power supply and other basic services as the threat to public health grows daily.

Roland Huguenin-Benjamin of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) told the BBC that less than half of the city’s hospitals were functioning – the rest had been ransacked by looters.

in a further sign of chaos, looters can now be seen selling stolen weapons and ammunition – including Kalashnikov assault rifles – openly on the streets.

The UN children’s fund Unicef says piles of rubbish are accumulating at the hospitals and up to 70% of patients at the children’s hospital now have diarrhoea.

It all speaks for itself. Ah, but Bechtel is riding in to clean up Rumsfeld’s mess.

I was just going to check email when I woke up my laptop this morning. But no, staring me in the face was this piece by Theresa Nielsen Hayden that Demosthenes had pointed me to just before I fell asleep last night.

So I read it. You should as well. She tells you what you should understand about looting, why the COW could not (would not?) control it and nicely summarizes the history of war cheerleading.

Donald Rumsfeld:

“Free people are free to make mistakes and commit crimes and do bad things, ” he declared.

This seems to be a fair representation of what this administration believes freedom to be.

Oh, and he thinks looting is untidiness? Go read what Emma has to say about this! And Jeanne d’Arc and CalPundit have a lot to say as well. I can not believe that folks are defending this behavior.

It was Sysyphus Shrugged’s delightful reaction to Emma’s post the led me through all this reading and thus to the realization that it will be important for our future that we keep these kind of things in everyone’s minds as we head toward the 2004 elections.

Busy Busy Busy has found Thomas Friedman’s current moral compass and suggests that Friedman is now of one mind with Rumsfeld regarding post invasion security for the Iraqi people.
Back in ancient history (4/9) Friedman said:

America broke Iraq; now America owns Iraq, and it owns the primary responsibility for normalizing it. If the water doesn’t flow, if the food doesn’t arrive, if the rains don’t come and if the sun doesn’t shine, it’s now America’s fault. We’d better get used to it, we’d better make things right, we’d better do it soon, and we’d better get all the help we can get.

Putting the two together suggests that Friedman’s moral compass is about as stable as sand dunes in the desert wind.

Wendy McElroy points us to this vision of post war Iraq (requires Flash).