Iraqis are desperate for clean water....after 5 years of the US occupying them.

[madfloridian]

What a horrible thing we did to invade in the first place, and we did such a lousy job of being occupiers.

From the NYT World section yesterday.

After 5 Years Of War, Iraqis Desperate For Water

Nearly a billion liters of raw sewage is dumped into Baghdad waterways each day -- enough to fill 370 Olympic-sized pools.

The United Nations estimates that less than half of Iraqis get drinking water piped into their homes in rural areas. In the capital, people set their alarm clocks to wake them in the middle of the night so they can fill storage tanks when water pressure is under less strain.

..."In the apartment bloc where Suhad Mohammed lives in eastern Baghdad, water pressure is so weak that water doesn't reach the top floors. Each morning, her husband and son help her fill plastic jugs from a communal tap downstairs and lug them up several flights of stairs.

"It gets even more complicated in the summer," she said.

The shortages are also causing health problems. Acute cases of diarrhea are three times more common in eastern Baghdad, where water service is most problematic, than in the rest of the city, the United Nations says. That side of the city has also seen a higher incidence of cholera.

Electricity which "flickers on in Baghdad for just a few hours a day, is another major problem. Back-up power systems at water plants are not designed to operate as often as they do."

I see the article tries to say the water system was neglected under Saddam Hussein. Sorry, but he's dead. We had him hung, and we killed his sons. We have controlled the country for five years plus. It is wrong to place blame anywhere else.

We have known all this, those of us on the internet....though many people just have closed minds. We have known the horrors we have done there.

Civilians fleeing...lacking food, water, supplies. Makeshift camps.


AHMAD AL-RUBAYE/AFP/Getty Images
Baghdad, IRAQ: Iraqi displaced children play outside a camp for displaced people in Baghdad's al-Karrada neighbourhood.

BAGHDAD, 12 July 2007 (IRIN) - Non-governmental organisations (NGOs) in southern Iraq are concerned about the fate of newly arriving internally displaced persons (IDPs), after the authorities in the southern provinces said they could not cope with any more of them.

About 9000 Iraqi families fled to the central city most of them from Baghdad, where they search for safety in camps for displaced people according to official sources from Najaf. The sources said that the increasing numbers of displaced people who are converging to the city's camps will soon suffer from a shortage of food and water supplies.

Another part from the NYT:

At the northern edge of Sadr City, a poor, largely Shi'ite area, a man named Ali points across a dusty, trash-strewn yard to the murky canal where he and his children bathe.

"The water is dirty, but what can we do? We don't have any other choice," he says, laughing bitterly.

We can not build the Iraqi infrastructure without our own infrastructure falling apart. Such a tragedy for both countries, no really good end in sight.

[CrispyQ]

1. The looting of our tresurey is almost complete.

The 10 Most Brazen War Profiteers

http://www.alternet.org/waroniraq/41083/?page=entire

Halliburton has become synonymous with war profiteering, but there are lots of other greedy fingers in the pie. We name names on 10 of the worst.

[DailyGrind51]

2. Yeah, we give it to them and then get accused of "ethnic cleansing"!

[leftchick]

3. give what to them?

Do you mean Iraqis? If that is who you are referring to it is called GENOCIDE. That is what the US is doing to them.

[otherlander]

4. WTF?

[madfloridian]

7. I don't know what you are getting at. We invaded on lies...and destroyed a country's

infrastructure.

I am writing about utter lack of capability at getting anything right.

[otherlander]

5. There was a time on DU

when lots of people would have responded to this thread.
I wonder why not anymore.
K&R for Truth.

[madfloridian]

6. Things have changed here.

If one does not post outrageous stuff with an all caps subject line and exclamation points...it drops.

We have pretty much accepted what we did in Iraq, and there seems to be not that much outrage anymore. :shrug: