Bad News from Iran

It’s complicated at first, but something unfortunate has been happening in Iraq in the last few days; it has been under attack from Iran.

This isn’t good. Don’t be fooled into thinking that Iran is fighting the same battle as the U.S. Iran has dropped bombs on the Northern Kurdish region of Iraq, a place where there has been no fighting and no violence for some time. The Kurds who inhabit the area have had shopping malls and coffee shops open there for more than a year and it is becoming a thriving metropolis where families could visit and feel safe.

Who are the Kurds? You may remember them as the people who were tortured by Saddam Hussein. Saddam was a Sunni Muslim and believed that killing the Kurds was his religious duty; like a terrible cult leader at the helm of a powerful country. Now, unemployed Sunnis travel to Kurdistan to ask the Kurds for jobs. Do you have any openings for a window cleaner? No hard feelings about the Mustard Gas, right?

After enduring previous years of hardship the Kurds secured their own part of Iraq and established the first new oil drilling in the New Iraq, Iran has simply decided to attack them. The people of Iran are enduring a terrible economy and a severe lack of jobs and their leader can only respond by attacking a peaceful neighbor.

Here are some pictures of Kurdistan Iraq from Michael Totten’s website. (It’s now how the media portrays Iraq, is it?) They’re from an older post, but he’s done some of the best work on Iraq so his site is one of the best places to go for real news about the war when you aren’t in the mood for the media’s seemingly endless coverage of wartime approval ratings.