…its now OK to report on the stunning victory we’ve achieved in Iraq:
Sunnis and Shi’ites made an emotional reach across the sectarian divide on Tuesday, reopening a Baghdad bridge between the two communities closed since a 2005 stampede, the deadliest incident of the war.
The Bridge of the Imams connects the Adhamiya and Kadhimiya neighborhoods of Baghdad, named for mediaeval Sunni and Shi’ite holy men whose landmark shrines on opposite sides of the Tigris are surrounded by homes of members of the separate communities.
It had been closed since 2005 when rumors of a suicide bombing panicked thousands of Shi’ites crossing the bridge for a pilgrimage to the Kadhimiya shrine. About one thousand people died in that stampede, clogging the river below with corpses.
But on Tuesday Sunni children from Adhamiya raced to see their Shi’ite friends in Kadhimiya. Women from the two communities met up on the bridge, kissing and hugging each other with joy.
“When the faces met, the lips smiled, hands shook, bodies hugged, the tears flowed out of joy. This is the Iraqi citizen,” said Sheikh Ahmed al-Samaraie, head of Iraq’s Sunni Endowment, which runs Sunni religious offices and mosques in Iraq.
A banner across the bridge read: “The bridge of love and reconciliation between the people of Adhamiya and Kadhimiya.”
God bless them all – and my fondest wish for the people of Iraq to at last have peace, and for our glorious troops to come home to a people who can never show enough gratitude for the quest they have so nobly completed for our nation. And kudos, also, to those in American who never doubted, never wavered – who kept faith with those who fight freedom’s battles.
It is just a pity we had to wade through years of anti-American sh** for us to reach this magnificent conclusion. There are plenty of people who should feel nothing but shame for the disgraceful role they’ve played.
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