"Baghdad has become the capital of death."

The LA Times has a heartbreaking piece by Patrick McDonnell, a correspondent who was based in Iraq for 2 years, gone for 1, and has just returned to find a shit-ton more chaos than when he left. It's rare that news articles about the war take on such an intensely personal tone as this one. It puts the terror and futility of people's lives there into such glaring light.

One man says, "I forced my son to leave school. It's more important that he be alive than educated."

"A Shiite Muslim religious party controls the main morgue near downtown; its militiamen guard the entrance, keen to snatch kin of the dead, many of them Sunni Muslim Arabs. Unclaimed Sunni corpses pile up."

"The U.S. mission here is now defined largely as training Iraqi police and soldiers. But Sunnis don't trust the mostly Shiite security forces, often with good reason. The question lingers: Are U.S. troops equipping Iraq's sectarian avengers?"

I found that article, and most others I read each day, through Slate's Today's Papers feature, which, if you don't already, you should really, really start reading. Really.

Today, TP ended with this blurb, which almost had me in tears.

This USA Today graph says that 47 percent of Iraqis think that the country is going in the "right direction." TP thought that either Iraqis had lost their minds or that the pollsters didn't speak Arabic until we spotted the qualifier underneath the graph: "Note: 93% of Sunni Arabs say the country is going in the wrong direction."