Death and Chaos in Iraq

U.S. aircraft bombed a house near the Syrian border before dawn on Monday in what the military said was a precision strike on an al Qaeda leader.

A local hospital doctor in the Iraqi town of Qaim said 40 people were killed and 20 wounded, many of them women and children, and a tribal leader said there were no guerrillas

See Eli on how typically disgusting this bombing and the manner in which the bombing is reported are.

The US has had it’s worst month this year for casualties in Iraq since January:

Seven U.S. troops were killed in three roadside bombings near Baghdad, the military said on Monday…[…]

That made October, which saw Iraqis vote for a constitution and put Saddam Hussein on trial, the worst month the Americans have suffered since January, when violence surged in advance of a parliamentary election.[…]

A week after the U.S. death toll since the 2003 invasion passed the 2,000 mark, it rose to at least 2,025 with the deaths of four soldiers in an attack on a patrol near Yusufiya, just south of Baghdad, and two in a similar incident near Balad, 60 km (40 miles) to the north of the capital.

It brought to 92 the number of Americans to die in October, the same as in August and the highest since 107 died in January.

And in Basra, a huge car bomb has just exploded:
A car bomb exploded Monday night in a commercial district of Iraq’s second-largest city of Basra, and it appeared at least 20 people had been killed and 40 injured, police said.

The blast went off about 8:30 p.m. in an area filled with shops and restaurants, many of them packed with people out for the evening during Ramadan festivities, Lieutenant-Colonel Karim al-Zaidi said.