Democracy is Not Enough
BY Herschel Smith
18 years ago
In a stunning word picture of Ramadi today, Martin Fletcher of the Times Online tells us what he saw as he recently entered Ramadi (h/t SWJ).
Ramadi has been laid waste by two years of warfare. Houses stand shattered and abandoned. Shops are shuttered up. The streets are littered with rubble, wrecked cars, fallen trees, broken lampposts and piles of rubbish.
Fetid water stands in craters. The pavements are overgrown. Walls are pockmarked by bullets and shrapnel. Side roads have been shut off with concrete barriers to thwart car bombs. Everything is coated in grey dust even the palm trees. The city has no functioning government, no telephones, and practically no basic services except sporadic electricity and water supplies. It has been reduced to a subsistence economy.
There are stray cats and wild dogs, but few cars or humans. Ramadi’s inhabitants have either fled, or learnt to stay indoors.
The letter from al Qaeda high command to Zarqawi indicates just how little true respect they have for their fellow Sunnis in the Anbar Province and just how far they are willing to go to effect their grand plan for a radical Islamic state.
“… be humble to the believers, and smile in people’s faces, even if you are cursing them in your heart, even if it has been said that they are “a bad tribal brother,
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