Riverbend, the most well known Iraqi blogger, is leaving Iraq.

http://riverbendblog.blogspot.com/

"I remember Baghdad before the war- one could live anywhere. We didn't know what our neighbors were- we didn't care. No one asked about religion or sect. No one bothered with what was considered a trivial topic: are you Sunni or Shia? You only asked something like that if you were uncouth and backward. Our lives revolve around it now. Our existence depends on hiding it or highlighting it- depending on the group of masked men who stop you or raid your home in the middle of the night.

On a personal note, we've finally decided to leave. I guess I've known we would be leaving for a while now. We discussed it as a family dozens of times. At first, someone would suggest it tentatively because, it was just a preposterous idea- leaving ones home and extended family- leaving ones country- and to what? To where?"

I don't really know what to say. I hope her family makes it. I hope she survives to continue letting Westerners and Americans know EXACTLY what our invasion of Iraq has done. I feel like America has failed as a nation, in the worst possible way. Not at 'winning wars' or 'kicking ass' or all that other bullshit. We have failed ourselves, we have failed our country's heart and soul. We have shamed ourselves. Land of the free, home of the brave?

Even though I have fought against going into Iraq from day one, I failed to stop this war from going forward. Even though I have turned countless of my friends and family around by showing them the truths of the situation, it didn't inspire them to start doing the same.

To them, I exposed the litany of lies from our President and his men. But it was all too late. It is too late to save 600,000 Iraqis from the might of a much more powerful country. It's too late to save the 3300 soldiers who have already died. It's too late to give thousands of Americans their missing limbs back. It's too late to save those who were so mentally scarred by this war that they killed themselves once they got back to America. It's too late to save the most progressive Middle Eastern country from turning into a seething pit of fundamentalist sectarianism.

I can't change the fact that my countrymen, on the whole- failed to live up to our country's greatest so-called goals. America gave up our own freedom because we were scared. We dismantled our own laws and became our own worst enemy. We became Russia that we so despised. A nation of christians became torturers. We let everything that this country stands for, down.

So why should River care about my wish for her familie's safety? Why would a jew in 1940s Germany care for the apology and well-wishes of one good German amongst a hundred barbarian ones?