With Bush out on a new “PR” push, we are learning more about how bad things really are in Iraq:

A mob of gunmen went on a brazen daytime rampage through a predominantly Sunni Arab district of western Baghdad on Sunday, pulling people from their cars and homes and killing them in what officials and residents called a spasm of revenge by Shiite militias for the bombing of a Shiite mosque on Saturday. Hours later, two car bombs exploded beside a Shiite mosque in another Baghdad neighborhood in a deadly act of what appeared to be retaliation.

While Baghdad has been ravaged by Sunni-Shiite bloodletting in recent months, even by recent standards the violence here on Sunday was frightening, delivered with impunity by gun-wielding vigilantes on the street. In the culture of revenge that has seized Iraq, residents all over the city braced for an escalation in the cycle of retributive mayhem between the Shiites and Sunnis that has threatened to expand into civil war.

The violence coincided with an announcement by American military officials that they had formally accused four more American soldiers of rape and murder, and a fifth soldier of “dereliction of duty” for failing to report the crimes, in connection with the deaths of a teenage Iraqi girl and three members of her family.

And once more charges get announced in other deaths, the violence will continue to grow.

What is amazing is how the mainstream media continued to just call the victim a “young girl”. No one seemed to ever mention just “how young” this poor girl was. I had heard about it on Air America, but the big three in network news seemed to overlook this small detail. Here is a picture of the passport of this young girl:

She was only 14 years old!! A child was put through this sort of horrible ordeal at the hands of the United States military. Stop and think about that. What was once the most cherished nation in the history of the world and treated as a symbol of human rights, is now the host to the perpetrators who committed this atrocity. This makes me sick.

Of course we will hear that the people raising hell in the streets of Iraq are “terrorists” or “insurgents”. The right will quickly paint them as a bunch of bad people, but are they? Here in my hometown, we had a young girl raped by a Mexican last year. That rape sparked enormous racial tensions, fighting and ultimately lead to the burning of the house the suspect lived in. The suspect has yet to be caught. Would we consider all these people “terrorists”. Let me add that a lot of the people were from the Klan and a lot were just kids.

The fact is when something like this happens in any society, the people of that society get mad (as well they should). No matter how hard people like Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh or Ann Coulter try to spin it, the fact remains that these are Iraqis who are fed up with their people being treated like this and the treatment especially coming from a foreign occupier. This is the problem this war has created and this is exactly why we have no option but to get the hell out of there. We are not fighting terrorists or insurgents anymore – we are creating them. Will someone smack that idiot in the White House upside the head so he can realize this.