The Common Ills: Haider is the new Nouri who was the new Saddam

Iraqi Spring MC notes Thursday's bombing of Falluja's residential neighborhoods left 8 civilians dead and twelve more injured. These are the attacks carried out by the Iraqi military. These are illegal and War Crimes. Iraq's Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi insisted these bombings had stopped September 13th. But they continued the next day and ever since.

Despite the fact that hospital sources in Falluja confirm these deaths and injuries regularly (and the confirm Iraqi Spring MC's Thursday count), the United Nations refuses to include these in their monthly death tolls while news agencies like the Associated Press bend over backwards to ignore them.

But if you were a Sunni in Iraq and you saw the government bombing the homes of other Sunnis and doing so for 16 months and counting, how likely would you be to believe the government supported you?

These bombings meet the legal definition of War Crimes. So Marie Harf and the State Dept are under orders never to acknowledge them. If a US official does, it's feared that military aid to Iraq, at the very least, would have to be cut (or the US would officially be involved in War Crimes).

That's why the US government stays silent.

Why the press does is a different question.

These bombings began under Nouri al-Maliki, former prime minister and forever thug, in January of 2014.

Haider al-Abadi was named prime minister in August of 2014.

The Iraqi people -- especially those groups most targeted by Nouri -- were supposed to believe that a change was taking place with Haider becoming prime minister.

If you're a Sunni in Iraq and you see the Iraqi military bombing Sunni homes under Nouri and then you see it continue under Haider, are you really going to believe that Haider's a change?

Or are you going to note this is yet another coward who fled Iraq under Saddam Hussein and only returned when the US-invasion had begun?

Maybe you'll note that, like Nouri, rumors swirl about Haider's involvement in terrorism when he was in exile. (Nouri al-Maliki, it's pretty much confirmed with photographic evidence, joined with Tehran in terrorist actions against the United States in the 1980s.)

Or maybe you'll just note that Dawa -- which was a terrorist organization, let's all be honest -- lost Nouri as prime minister but kept Haider as prime minister.

Some change.

The cycle of violence never ends and the US government and the international press continue to pretend that the cycle isn't fed by the actions of Iraq's prime minister.

Last June, Barack Obama insisted the only answer to these crises in Iraq was a political solution. In all the months since, the US has focused on bombing and lining up other countries to bomb. No one's supposed to remember the political solution apparently.

The following community sites -- plus Jody Watley -- updated: