The Iraq "Civil War" -

Hey Acro, since you're obviously an authority on this, please point out the statistics on this civil war that is raging beyond control in Iraq right now.

The mass media must not be covering this conflict that surely, being a civil war, must mean that Sistani has taken the leash off the Shi'a dogs of war, and that every major Iraqi city is engulfed in Sunni v.s. Shi'a conflict and is making Rwanda look like a corner street fight.

Damn the MSM....Fox must be controlling everything now to keep this hidden from us.

 

Your second paragraph is the lacking logic.

Civil war does not require "percentages" of dead , nor vast hordes marching toward each others grapeshot fusillade, no.
Civil war is only what is required to keep "normal" governance, normal capital flows, in a state of uncertainty to the degree that the average person cant trust a given government.
End of story.

Hey, that sounds familiar.........
It does require however, people shooting at each-other, and some casualties, who CANT be controlled by normal peacetime law.
Iraq more than meets that standard, no?

 

That's because you don't even know what a civil war is.

A civil war is not defined by the average person not trusting government. It’s not defined by uncertainty. It’s not defined by the existence of ethnic factions (which always exist) willing to wage war on each other. And it’s certainly not defined by people trying to spark a civil war by blowing things up. A civil war is a war, not a potential for war.

America certainly had a potential for civil unrest in 1859, and John Brown’s Harper’s Fairy incident got the ball rolling to an all out war. But in Iraq, they had probably hundreds of Harper’s Fairy incidents –including incidents financed by Sunni Jihadists, Syrian Baathists, and the Iranian government --all trying to get this civil war started so America will cut and run and Iraq will be up for grabs. Guess what? No civil war. They keep trying to light that fire, but no fire.

Perhaps because an influential majority of Iraqis, unlike the Americans in 1858, don’t want a stinkin’ civil war because they are tired of war and want Iraq to become a peaceful and prosperous state kept away from the hands of Arab dictators and Islamists.

Let the journalists look for the few troublemakers who kill people and define it as a proxy for the “state of Iraq,” because after all, anything constructive going on in Iraq isn’t “fit to print,” And why would journalists want to report things they know will never have a chance getting printed?

 

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March 14, 2006

SouthAmerica: Over the weekend (March 11 and 12) The Financial Times of London published the following article regarding the current all-out civil war in Iraq.


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“Pandora's Iraqi box”
Published: March 11, 2006
The Financial Times - UK


When Zalmay Khalilzad, US ambassador to Baghdad, said earlier this week that America had "opened . . . Pandora's box" by invading Iraq, he was making almost the only realistic statement any senior US official has made about the Iraqi situation for a very long time. After three years of serial bungling that has brought Iraq to the brink of an all-out civil war that risks setting fire to the Middle East, this statement is not just rueful hindsight. It indicates that the Iraq the Bush administration has tried to transform by force of arms has reached the most dangerous moment in what was always going to be an extraordinarily risky enterprise.

After last month's bombing of the Askariya shrine in Samarra - an explosion along the faultline dividing Sunni and Shia Muslims - Iraq is sliding into a mire of sectarian war and ethnic cleansing. "We're in a civil war now," according to retired Gen William Nash, former commander in Bosnia. "It's just that not everybody's joined in." Yet.

The risk that Iraq would collapse into communalist savagery, a sort of Lebanon cubed, was pointed out in the run-up to the invasion, including in these columns. But once the occupation authorities disbanded the army, security services and Ba'ath party - dominated by the minority Sunnis - they inevitably fell back on the majority Shia and their Kurdish allies, and just as inevitably came to rely on their militias, however much they rebadged them as a new "national" army.

US and coalition forces are increasingly regarded as just another set of militias in this multi-sided conflict, which is exactly what happened when they intervened in the Lebanese war.

The Sunni insurgents regard them as allies of the "apostate" Shia. But after Washington belatedly started pushing for "inclusive" policies to embrace the Sunnis and split the overwhelmingly Sunni insurgency, the Shia are turning against the US. Both groups, furthermore, regard the Americans as complicit in Kurdish attempts to evict Arabs from the ethnically mixed powder-keg of Kirkuk. Wittingly or not, the US is deeply embroiled, and seen as part of the sectarian equation.

Iraq's neighbours, meanwhile, watching the wave of killing unleashed by the Askariya bombing, are trying to judge whether the situation has reached the point at which they must intervene forcefully to safeguard their own interests - Iran behind the Shia, the Saudis and Jordanians alongside the Sunnis, and the Turks to forestall Kurdish independence. That would be another reprise of Lebanon, but in a bigger, more dangerous arena.

Is there any way this diabolical dynamic can be stopped?

The religious restraints imposed by clerical leaders such as Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani seem to have been broken by massacres, as well as the relentless targeting of doctors and academics, pilots and engineers, on both sides.

One great political effort is now required of Iraq and the region, and everyone with a stake in its stability.

The core of this effort is the indispensable need for a broad-based government of national unity, which stops treating Iraq's weak institutions as sectarian booty and delivers Iraqis' wish to live securely in a loose federation.

But Iraq's neighbours must be convened - in a follow-up to last autumn's "reconciliation" conference in Cairo - to support this goal and commit themselves to the territorial integrity of a united if federal country. There is little time left to build bulwarks against a looming Balkans-in-the-sands.


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Don't you know that it's not a civil war until you can see the whole country burning from space, come on, get with it.

 

The dumb media elites who perpetuate this “civil war” crap believe that dozens of people killed by suicide bombs in a country of 26 million people is the same as the whole country burning in space.

 

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Sam123: The dumb media elites who perpetuate this “civil war” crap believe that dozens of people killed by suicide bombs in a country of 26 million people is the same as the whole country burning in space.


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March 14, 2006

SouthAmerica: The same people who still are looking for Saddam’s WMD today are the same people who thinks that Iraq is not in the middle of a nast sectarian civil war.

The Iraqis are very adaptable to everything that the US is trying to do in Iraq – or at least give the appearance of trying to do in Iraq – the reality is after 3 years of occupation in Iraq the United States has very little to show for to the Iraqi people regarding the matter of improving the infrastructure and so on…..

The Iraqis have been using target killing – they are killing the people that you need to run hospitals, schools, transit systems such as trains. Anyone who is helping the companies doing any reconstruction in Iraq and so on…

The Iraqis have no electric power, no water system and the United States has been training their sectarian militias in hope that they will become an army and police to replace what they had under the Saddam Hussein system.

The ethnic cleansing between the Shiites and Sunnis has been under way for quite a while.

Only “brain-dead” people still thinks that things are not going from bad to worse in Iraq on a daily basis – and that Iraq is not in the middle of an all out civil war between Shiites and Sunnis.

I know that many Americans are very slow in catching up on what is going on around the world – but you don’t have to be a rocket scientist to figure out that Iraq is in the middle of a nasty civil war.

Hello – the lights are on but there is anybody home?

The only thing that the United States can do to try to reduce the effects of the Iraqi civil war at this point – it is to reinstate Saddam Hussein to power and let him reorganize his army and his police as soon as possible. This is the only alternative left for the United States in Iraq – other than that - the US can count on a nasty civil war that can spread to the other countries in the area and most likely will spread to the entire Middle East engulfing it into a massive war zone.

Americans will look stupid when they reinstate Saddam Hussein into power in Iraq, but the United States will look even more stupid to the rest of the world when the entire Middle East is engulfed into a major war – a war started by the US by the most incompetent people in US government history.

Today the US Army that is stuck in Iraq in the middle of the Iraqi civil war - reminds me of George Armstrong Custer - who is best remembered for his defeat and death at the Battle of the Little Bighorn against a coalition of Native American tribes led by Crazy Horse.


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Guess who looks stupid even suggesting that this will happen?

ROFLMAO!!

 

This “civil war” should have happened a few years ago, and by now, hundreds of thousands would have been killed. We get staged shootings and bombings on a daily basis, but there is no evidence of a popular grass roots sectarian uprising going on, let alone a civil war. Iraq has Sunnis and Shiites. America has blacks and whites. I didn’t recall any civil war following the Rodney King riots.

This is not some wishful thinking held by people who want Iraq to succeed. It’s all about the common sense fact that you can’t make a causal link between the suicide bombings staged by our enemies on a daily basis, and the hearts and minds of 26 million Iraqis. Most Iraqis are tired of war and the last thing they want is a civil war.

Of course, our media elites want to ignore this and remain hysterical while they continue with their selective reporting and analysis, re-reporting, and manipulation of the facts ---all in line with their annoying political Freudian slips and closed-minded superstitions.

They see troublemakers trying to light a wet log every day and they call it a bonfire. Sheesh.

I’m still waiting for this civil war.

 

Ah, i see, your a "big" war definition man, sam.
Like the invasion of iraq (2) was a "limited" engagement, that sort of thing.
It would be helpful for us persons, if perhaps you could describe the countries in whatever time frame you like, that you regard as having been in a state of "civil war", diregarding what the state department may have said about it.

This is just a definition issue, clearly.