Six bombs, 95 dead – carnage and despair return to Iraq.

What the Hell have we done to that country?

It has, for many months now, had the feel of a normal Arab capital. Families picnicking on street verges at dusk. Children playing football in the street. Marketplaces teeming with shoppers and touts.

But today, just after 10.30am, a series of sharp and violent explosions hammered home just how relative normality is in Baghdad. By the end of the day, 95 people were dead and more than 500 wounded in the most lethal series of attacks in the Iraqi capital this year.

The explosions did more than create the dismal scenes of carnage and death. They confounded at a stroke the creeping belief that the Iraqi government had broken free from the extremists who have held the country to ransom for the past six years.

"Not long ago, the Iraqi forces removed the concrete walls from the checkpoint near us," said Amira Jabar, 33, outside her ruined house next to the stricken foreign ministry.

"Now they have put us in the frontline to be killed like this while they protect themselves totally inside the Green Zone."

Nothing like this ever happened before our illegal invasion. But Iraq has become a living Hell ever since Bush's "liberation". Do we even have any idea of how many Iraqi people have died during this colossal folly? No, we don't, because we have never bothered to count the number of Iraqi dead.

Close to 100 nearby homes were levelled or severely damaged. A government apartment block that was once home to Saddam Hussein's second wife, Samira Shabanda, was heavily damaged. The 12-storey finance ministry building that she used to see from her balcony teetered on its outer columns. "There are still people inside," said one soldier smoking a cigarette outside the ministry. "Most of them are dead, but others may be alive. The building is too unsafe for us to enter."

I watched Michelle Malkin on TV the other day proclaiming that she still stood by this war and that she still thought that what we did was right. These people have to be utterly immune to human suffering, able to block out every ability to empathise, that they have never once doubted the dreadful consequences - paid for by other people - for their cheer leading of Bush's illegal war.

They are without conscience.

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Tags: Iraq war, Baghdad, 95 dead