Moot

Yesterday, I went over to Kala's house to give him my condolences about his brother-in-law to be's murder. The guy and his cousin I think were driving back from work when they were attacked and were left with two bullet wounds each, one in the neck and one in the chest. The news ofcourse hit hardest on Kala's seventeen year-old sister the one to whom the guy was engaged.

I'm against the death penalty in general to start off with. I'm against killing all together except if it's in direct self-defence. So it's been somewhat depressing to hear people call for the death of Saddam because even though the man's got the blood of thousands on his hands I don't want his blood on mine and it's even more so depressing to see such a lust for blood so widely acceptable.

Today's news of the mass kidnapping at a Ministry of Education building, got me thinking that if Saddam's ruling to be executed was justifiable by his actions, then why can't this present government be held accountable in the same way for their inaction that has also lead to countless murders and a nation living in a fear even greater than that of Saddam's?

It's suprising to me that the government can't get a better grip on it's police and other security forces. To me it's obvious that it's unwilling. For example, when driving through Baghdad you'll get cars with loud sirens with gunmen sometimes shooting live rounds in the air either dressed up as police or army and even civilian clothes force you to get out of your lane so that they may zip by. Why are civilian dressed men allowed to carry guns is beyond me. But the fact is that a member of parliament would have a security detail dressed as civilians, and that's not right.

What's worse is how these same convoy just pass drive right through the checkpoints. If the checkpoints are there then they one would think that they should be checking any vehicles that have the potential of being suspicious. And since gunmen dressed in police cars have been blatantly comitting crimes then the logical thing to do would be to have them checked at the checkpoints regularly.

I often wonder why the police and the army have to drive about so much, Saddam's police and army didn't move about this much nor did they have as many vehicles for that matter.

With all the money being spent on security in Iraq, it wouldn't be too much of a leap to have a communication network setup to have all the police/army convoys keep communication with some center so that the center may relay all relevant information prior to the convoy's arrival to a checkpoint so as to acknowledge both the convoy and the checkpoint.

I know I'm just ranting on at this point, I don't know what these checkpoints nor the police are expected to do by their superiors to be honest, as far as I can tell they just bottleneck all the traffic and the police ones hang about to pick up bribes. I just feel that things could be so much better if those in power and those on the ground would just focus and do things right.