Iraq prison break a bad sign of things to come

So states the headline of an on line article today at worldnews.nbcnews.com by Richard Engel, Chief Foreign Correspondent for NBC News. Jeff Black of NBC News and Reuters contributed to the report.

Engel writes that the prison break by al Qaeda operatives which released at least 250 militants from Baghdad's "notorious" Abu Ghraib prison on Sunday "was a major victory for the terrorists and a blow to the Shiite-dominated Iraqi government".

The al Qaeda attackers used car bombs to open the gates and then several of them rushed in and blew themselves up with suicide vests to repel a counter-defense by prison guards.

Engel speculates that the success of the attack "could raise more questions about the blood spilled -- nearly 4,000 American lives -- and the trillion dollars spent to bring stability to the oil-rich country."

So also did Jeremiah lament over the vision of a future Babylon in the biblical prophetic passage in Jeremiah 50-51, "we applied healing to her, but she could not be healed..."

The prison break certainly is a bad sign of things to come, as the U.S.-led invasion and occupation and the demise of Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein not only fit the descriptions of certain judgments upon "Babylon the land of the Chaldeans" -- known today as the nation of Iraq -- pronounced by the prophet Jeremiah in the hebrew bible, but are merely the first three judgments of even more severe catastrophes coming, to include the burning of the cities, abandonment by the foreign reconstructionists, civil war between the Chaldeans and the Kurds ("Medes"), the plundering of Iraq's "treasures" by the victorious armies from out of the north, and then an unprecedented flood event of the Euphrates and subsequent destructive drought that renders the whole land uninhabitable.

So yes, the prison break is, as Engel writes, "a bad sign of things to come."

When the cities burn, the next phase of calamities will have begun.