Record Numbers at Baghdad's Morgue

From the Chicago Tribune:

BAGHDAD -- July was a record month at Baghdad's main morgue, where the bodies pile up so fast they often have to be buried before they can be identified to make way for the next day's arrivals.
 
A total of 1,100 corpses were received in July, a sharp increase from the previous record of 879 in June, and far exceeding the morgue's 10-a-day capacity, according to its overworked director, Faed Bakr.
 
The figures exclude casualties from bombings, which are not taken for autopsy because the cause of death already is known.

"When you have this number of killings every day, when you have 676 people die from shooting in a month, you're talking about mass killing," Bakr said. "It's not civil war, but it's instability, and it's out of control."

It is impossible to attribute all the killings to the insurgency. The statistics include common murders as well as civilians killed by Iraqi security forces and American troops.

This is, obviously, depressing. And it raises a few issues: I'm not sure of numbers, but it's my understanding that by far the greatest concentration of GIs in Iraq is in Baghdad. And yet you have what appears to be increasing and now general lawlessness.  What does that suggest for the argument that  more troops would tamp things down? I'm asking honestly--and theoretically--because  we don't have the troops anyway.  The other ominious indicator, of course, is that many of the new arrivals at the morgue appear to executed in sectarian killings.   

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[Homer]

One of the great things about gardening in the 21st century is that there are lots of new plants introduced very year.