The Sunni Islamists are trying to create a propaganda campaign of a civil war in Iraq, which YOU obviously fall for. They kill Shiites to get people like you to support the notion of sectarian violence, and they also kill anyone joining the security forces to disrupt the organized governance of Iraq. Iraq is more unified than you believe. Facts are facts. If you think I have a low I.Q, then you must also believe Iâm making shit up when I say Iraq has 26 million people. Show me the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and Iâll succumb to the notion of a civil war taking place in Iraq.
. Sam123: The Sunni Islamists are trying to create a propaganda campaign of a civil war in Iraq, which YOU obviously fall for. They kill Shiites to get people like you to support the notion of sectarian violence, and they also kill anyone joining the security forces to disrupt the organized governance of Iraq. Iraq is more unified than you believe. Facts are facts. ******** SouthAmerica: I know that Americans are in denial about the Iraq sectarian civil war. But today outside the United States foreigners grasp things faster than Americans do it â and the international mainstream media refer to that conflict as âa sectarian civil war in Iraq.â I understand every thing is under control in Iraq according to the same source that said that Iraq was going to produce nuclear weapons in a matter of months. Sure. **** News from a âFrenchâ newspaper â June 27, 2006 âCivil War Violence Leaves 60 Dead over 100 Woundedâ Bombings and other civil war violence took the lives of at least 60 Iraqis on Monday. In addition, guerrillas kidnapped 10 Sunni students who were attending a technical institute in Shiite East Baghdad. Source: http://www.agoravox.com/article.php3?id_article=4916 .
. July 2, 2006 SouthAmerica: This is what it is really going on behind the religious sectarian civil war in Iraq. I just hope they did change the name of these people that they mentioned on this article â otherwise all these people also will be killed in no time. It must be easy for Americans to gather intelligence in Iraq under such a circumstances. What kind of info the Iraqis can provide to the American forces any way? When they donât exchange any useful information even among themselves. Only idiots think that things are going well in Iraq - for the government that the US installed inside the Green Zone and also for the US coalition of the clueless. ****************** âIn Iraq, what you do is best kept secretâ Sunnis pose as Shiites, rich people pose as poor, and no one says where they work. Telling the truth could bring a death sentence. By Megan K. Stack, Los Angeles Times â Sunday, July 02, 2006 BAGHDAD, Iraq -- You don't want to draw attention, so you keep a battered car even if you can afford a fancier model. You don't wash it; better to let dust smear the windows. Night falls, curfew clamps down, and all those dirty old cars wend their way back to the homes of the capital. The eyes of neighbors slide after them. Where are the drivers coming from? Some work for the government. Some fight with insurgents or death squads. Some are employed by Americans. No one asks, and no one tells; nobody knows who's who. Bloodshed has turned Iraq into a country defined by disguise and bluff. Violence in the streets has begun to defy logic, and this is part of the fallout: A lively city where people used to butt gleefully into one another's business has degenerated into a labyrinth of disguises, a place where neighbors brush silently past one another like dancers in a macabre costume ball. "Everything is hidden among Iraqis; people are very suspicious of one another," said 66-year-old Hayawi Mahdi Abaasi, a successful lawyer who says he won't repair his tumble-down house or replace his 1982 Toyota for fear the wrong people would notice. "Why should I call the attention of terrorists to me? I try to be very common like everyone else," he said. Rich people hide their jewelry and dig frayed clothes from the back of their closets to evade ransom-seeking kidnappers. Muslims claim to be Sunni or Shiite, depending on circumstance. Christians pose as Muslims. Lying about employment is de rigueur. Street police wrap their faces in masks so nobody will recognize them. Everybody, it seems, is pretending to be somebody else, adopting a fake identity in the terrified hope of staying safe. Baghdad residents reason that no matter who you are, you're probably on somebody's hit list. "It's not a matter of lying or not lying," said Ali Abdullah. "It's a matter of life or death." Mr. Abdullah is a 31-year-old Sunni with dark skin, a strapping build and a bushy strip of mustache. Like most people in Baghdad, he is a man of secrets. He was trained as an engineer in Saddam Hussein's Iraq but now works for an American nonprofit organization. His life has been threatened and his wife begs him to quit, but he says he can't -- the money is too good, and they have a 3-year-old son to think about. Abdullah takes a taxi to work so his car won't be recognized. He uses different streets each time and changes his telephone number every few months. He splurged on a $100 Swatch watch in neighboring Jordan, but now he's afraid to wear it in public. When people ask about his job, he lies and says he owns a computer shop. Rule No. 1, he says: Never, under any circumstance, intimate to the neighbors on his predominantly Sunni street that he's sold out to the foreigners. "This is a killer, if my neighbors find out where I work," he said. "This is the first thing that must be maintained, that my neighbors can't know what I do." For Mr. Abdullah and his family, that has meant isolation. He shrinks from possible conversations, taking care not to linger in his doorway, make eye contact or trade small talk. When he caught sight of an old college friend across a crowded restaurant recently, he turned on his heels and rushed away to avoid conversation. When they talk about the loss of intimacy, many Iraqis are mournful. Like members of most Middle Eastern societies, Iraqis have traditionally prized warmth and valued social interchange over what Westerners might regard as personal privacy. In the old Iraq, it was better to err on the side of nosiness than to appear cold or distant. It was perfectly normal to grill strangers on their marital status and the price of their possessions. Little by little, that warmth has been bled away by war. Tension pulls on the city now. The atmosphere is thick with intrigue; it feels film noir, cloak-and-dagger. Except it is real -- and deadly. "Behavior has changed from rational behavior into instinctive, animalistic behavior," said Ehsan Mohammed Hassan, one of Iraq's leading sociologists and a professor at Baghdad University. "The individual is not safe from the others. He has to hide. He doesn't want people to see him because he thinks the people are evil." Amid the fear and loathing, a long-standing tribal tradition has disappeared. Etiquette used to require men to ask one another about their jobs; it was a way of showing concern for a friend's livelihood and to demonstrate willingness to help a man if he had fallen on hard times. These days, though, to ask about jobs is impolite -- perhaps even dangerous. Instead, men find themselves throwing out other questions: How are you? What are you doing here? "A lot of people are killed for no reason. So what do you think they'll do if you work for the Americans?" Mr. Abdullah asked. "That's it. You're a traitor." Working for the Iraqi government is no better -- everybody from university professors to national athletes to traffic police has been slaughtered by insurgents determined to bludgeon civic and social life to a standstill. Iraq may be the only country in the world where militia members and anti-government insurgents walk the streets with bare faces while government workers, soldiers and cops cower behind masks. "I wear a mask because I don't want people to know I'm working for the police," a 34-year-old officer named Ahmed Ali said on a recent afternoon. It was lunch hour, and he and some of his colleagues had driven across Baghdad through the 110-degree heat to gobble down lamb kebabs in a neighborhood where they knew fewer people. The men are stationed in the volatile Dora area, south of downtown and one of Baghdad's bloodiest sectarian battlefields. Clad in matching blue button-downs and navy trousers, their pistols holstered on their waists, they admitted they didn't dare bring their badges or uniforms home, not even to launder them. They described slipping from the house in civilian clothes, creeping into the station and changing hurriedly into their uniforms. Amid the fear, some profit. The document forger, for one. Assad Kheldoun, a 29-year-old who operates out of the religiously mixed neighborhood of Shaab, grinds out fake identity cards for about $30 apiece. "Exactly like the original," he boasts. But with one difference: A false name. He's not selling to hustlers or mischief makers. Most of his clients are bus drivers, highway workers or car repairmen -- people forced to make their livings in Iraq's mean streets. Last names are sectarian giveaways in Iraq, often deriving from tribes commonly known to be either Sunni or Shiite. Jaabour or Dulaimi, for instance, mean "Sunni" to Iraqis; so does the first name Omar. "People are getting killed because of their names," Kheldoun said. "In the past few months, everybody is asking for a false identity card. It's a phenomenon now. The people are scared." .
. July 2, 2006 SouthAmerica: At this point the Los Angeles Times still describing on its article the Iraq war as: âAfter a relative lull, sectarian violence has escalated, sending this country skittering again to the edge of civil war.â I wonder how come the American mainstream media still canât grasp that Iraq has been in the middle of a religious sectarian civil war for a long time. I understand their denial at a certain level â many Americans still think that the US did not lose the Vietnam War even 30 years after that conflict ended. They are slow in grasping things related to lost causes. ******************** âMassacre at Market in Iraqâ By Louise Roug and Raheem Salman, Times Staff Writers Los Angeles Times - July 2, 2006 BAGHDAD â A suicide car bombing at a crowded open-air market Saturday killed 77 people and wounded 96 in the deadliest single attack since the Iraqi government was formed six weeks ago. Other violence brought the day's toll to 92 even as authorities announced the discovery of 26 bodies. The market, in the poor Shiite neighborhood of Sadr City, was teeming with activity when the bomber struck: Fruit sellers could be heard haggling loudly as shoppers wandered past carts laden with vegetables and watermelons. "Then the huge explosion came," said Raheem Shawaili, a 47-year-old shopkeeper, recounting how everything around him changed in an instant. First, there were "gray plumes of smoke," he said. "Then, the smoke became dark." The blast shattered windows, ripped doors from their hinges and set rows of cars ablaze. Carts used by children to carry goods for shoppers lay wrecked in the dusty street among other debris: metal, human flesh and crushed vegetables. The attack came as Prime Minister Nouri Maliki embarked on a trip to Saudi Arabia and other Persian Gulf states to gather support for a reconciliation initiative intended to bridge the gap between Shiites and Sunni Arabs. Under the plan, some insurgents will be offered amnesty, although it is unclear exactly how it would be implemented. Americans have criticized the plan for being too broad, but Sunni Arabs have faulted it for being too narrow. Maliki said last week that extending amnesty to violent insurgents was out of the question. "There are demands for general amnesty, but in my opinion this is wrong," he said. "We have people we have detained who have confessed to killing 10, 20, 50, 100 Iraqis and Americans." The high death toll Saturday could further impede Maliki's reconciliation plan. In Sadr City, the political office affiliated with firebrand Shiite cleric Muqtada Sadr criticized Maliki for not canceling his trip, and angry residents criticized the government and American troops for failing to prevent the attack. "With whom does Maliki want us to make reconciliation?" Mansoor Munim, 26, said. "With those who are killing us daily?" Survivors remembered some of those killed in the bombing: a 12-year-old boy named Aqil and his mother, who had been selling eggs at one of the stalls; an older man who was a taxi driver, also named Aqil; Abu Waleed, a father of six; and many others. "Even the animals were the victims of their brutality," said Hanoon Thamir, 47. "I saw an injured horse bleeding and kicking from the pain of its injuries until it died." Sabri Faleh Bahadli looked on with despair as residents cleaned up the bloody scene, shoveling debris and victims' shoes onto dump trucks. The 49-year-old baker saw his neighbor's teenage son, Sami, stagger away from the explosion cradling his right hand, which was almost severed at the wrist. Officials at the Imam Ali Hospital in Sadr City said early today that 77 people had died in the explosion and 96 had been wounded. At the morgue next to the hospital, some volunteers helped people find their relatives. Others, including Ali Aboodi, 35, collected body parts. "This eye, this ring, this leg," Aboodi said, as he separated the remains into three nylon bags. Some of the remains, including a small arm, belonged to children, he said. A previously unknown group calling itself the Sunni Supporters claimed responsibility for the bombing in an Internet statement. The statement could not be verified. After a relative lull, sectarian violence has escalated, sending this country skittering again to the edge of civil war. On one side, the Sunni Arab-led insurgency's relentless bombings have devastated the Shiite majority, killing soldiers and police officers, women and children. On the other, Sunni Arab leaders allege that police officers and special commandos, most of them Shiites, operate death squads that target the minority sect in a campaign of sectarian cleansing. On Saturday, Sunni legislator Taiseer Mashhadani and her four bodyguards were kidnapped on the road from Baqubah to Baghdad. According to her political group, 30 armed men stopped her convoy at a checkpoint and disarmed and seized everyone except one guard who managed to escape. "If abducting members of parliament keeps going on, then there will be no parliament and no country," said Amal Qadhi, another legislator with the Iraqi Accordance Front, the main Sunni group. The U.S. Embassy in Baghdad condemned the kidnapping as "repugnant." "Acts such as the abduction of Ms. Mashhadani have no justification," a statement said. "They aim simply to terrify innocent Iraqis and provoke further conflict." Despite a much-publicized security crackdown in Baghdad, at least 15 people were killed in other incidents and authorities reported the discovery Saturday of 26 bodies in three locations. In south Baghdad, police discovered a grave containing the remains of 16 people recently killed. In addition, two bodies were found in the southern neighborhood of Dora and eight were discovered on the banks of the Euphrates River near Musayyib, south of Baghdad. The victims included soldiers and civilians, and all bore signs of torture. Two roadside bombs killed three police officers and injured five people in separate attacks in the eastern neighborhood of New Baghdad. Across the river, to the west, gunmen in separate attacks killed an engineer, a taxi driver and a 20-year-old who was waiting in line for gasoline. In the restive Diyala province, gunmen opened fire at three men and two children in a barbershop. The men, who were brothers, were killed but the barber and the children survived, authorities said. On the road between Tikrit and Kirkuk, armed men in a convoy of 10 cars attacked a checkpoint, killing five Iraqi soldiers and abducting three others, an Iraqi army official said. Gunmen also killed Alaa Khaled, a traffic cop, at the city's Festival Square. Friends and relatives said Khaled was buried in a suit he had just bought â for his wedding the following day. Times staff writer Saif Rasheed in Baghdad contributed to this report. .
. July 20, 2006 SouthAmerica: On July 19, 2006 The New York Times had a front-page story: âIraqi Death Toll Rises Above 100 Per Day, U.N. Says.â â Steady increase is seen â Tally of civilians is largest since Baghdad fell. I wonder how many people need to be killed per day in Iraq for the US mainstream media to start referring to that conflict as a sectarian civil war. Why the US mainstream media does not refer to the current war in Iraq as a civil war? What is so hard to grasp in that conflict that is so confusing for American journalists? Iraq is in the middle of a nasty sectarian civil war â if Americans want to recognize it or not. Today, the government of Somalia has more credibility with the people of that country than the group of people that the US did try to install in Iraq as their legitimate government. (The Iraqis certainly are not buying it.) As the sectarian civil war in Iraq spins completely out of control and the death toll reaches new records â The Bush administration is very pleased that Lebanon and the Palestinian Authority are going up in smoke and serve as a diversion from what is going on in Iraq. The Bush administration is thanking very much to Israel for a job well done â keep the diversion going as long as possible, because the shit is hitting the fan in Iraq. PS: From Bush to Israel â After you guys annihilate Lebanon can you annihilate also Syria on our behalf? - Because we canât keep up with things even in Iraq and Afghanistan never mind get involved also in Syria. .
. July 21, 2006 SouthAmerica: During May and June 2006 almost 6,000 Iraqi civilians were killed on the sectarian civil war in Iraq. At the current rate of killings we will have at least 35,000 Iraqi civilians killed in Iraq during 2006 and the Iraq civil war has been spinning completely out of control for a long time. What the American mainstream media is waiting to starting referring to that conflict as a nasty sectarian civil war? It is a civil war for all practical purposes. Why the US mainstream media still is in denial? What is the benchmark or the threshold to be meet for them to realize that there is a nasty sectarian civil war raging all over Iraq? ******** Note: Benchmark: A standard by which something can be measured or judged Threshold: The point that must be exceeded to begin producing a given effect or result or to elicit a response ******** âNearly 6,000 Iraqi civilians died in May and June, UN saysâ CBC News - Ca July 18, 2006 An average of nearly 100 Iraqi civilians were killed every day in May and June, a UN report released Tuesday says. The toll in the two months was 5,818 deaths, the UN Assistance Mission in Iraq reported. The report shows civilian deaths have risen steadily this year, from 710 in January to 1,129 in April to 2,669 in May and 3,149 in June. It calculated that 14,338 people had been killed in the first half of the year. "While welcoming recent positive steps by the government to promote national reconciliation, the report raises alarm at the growing number of casualties among the civilian population killed or wounded during indiscriminate or targeted attacks by terrorists and insurgents, as well as militias and criminal groups," a UN media release said. "Kidnapping of individuals and groups, for ransom or political purposes, also continued to surge." The report cites the example of 15 Tae Kwon Do athletes abducted in May. "There is no news regarding their whereabouts." The figures are based on reports from the Iraqi Ministry of Health, which tracks deaths reported by hospitals, and the Medico-Legal Institute in Baghdad, which monitors unidentified bodies. Civil leaders are targets The report paints a picture of a country slipping into lawlessness, with assassinations and bombings a daily occurrence, and the country in the grip of what some observers have called a civil war. As well as the militants who are fighting government and coalition forces, minority Sunni Arabs and majority Shias frequently attack each other. Key civilians, who hold society together, have been targeted, among them teachers, judges, religious leaders and doctors. The steady violence has forced people from their homes, the report said. The mission's statistics are higher than those tabulated by other sources, such as the Associated Press, but many deaths in Iraq go unreported. The UN Assistance Mission is helping the government develop political institutions and social and civil services. Source: AP - Associated Press .
. July 24, 2006 SouthAmerica: I am glad that the most influential newspaper in the United States â The New York Times - has published the following article on July 23, 2006: âItâs Official: There Is Now a Civil War in Iraq.â I guess the US mainstream media is finally âwaking upâ to the realities of what has been going on in Iraq for a long time â Iraq has been engulfed on a nasty sectarian civil war. The next step is for the US government to announce that they are going to withdraw the US occupational forces from Iraq because only real âFOOLSâ would stay in Iraq to try to be a babysitter for a bunch of people engaged on a sectarian civil war. ********************* âItâs Official: There Is Now a Civil War in Iraqâ By NICHOLAS SAMBANIS Published: July 23, 2006 The New York Times New Haven - HAS the conflict in Iraq turned into a civil war? Civil wars are defined as armed conflicts between the government of a sovereign state and domestic political groups mounting effective resistance in relatively continuous fighting that causes high numbers of deaths. This broad definition does not always distinguish civil wars from other forms of political violence, so we often use somewhat arbitrary criteria, like different thresholds of annual deaths, to sort out cases. Depending on the criteria used, there have been about 100 to 150 civil wars since 1945. Iraq is clearly one of them. Many people might have a narrowly construed idea of what constitutes a civil war based on familiar examples, like the American Civil War. Civil wars, however, actually vary widely. They include bloody yet short-lived coups (Argentina in 1955); organized civilian massacres by the warring parties (Burundi in 1972 and in 1988); guerrilla warfare combined with genocide (as in Cambodia and Guatemala); recurrent bouts of factional conflict in the military (Central African Republic from 1996 to 1997); combinations of criminal and political violence (Chechnya and Algeria in the late 1990âs); self-determination struggles (Sri Lanka since 1983, Bangladesh in 1971 and Sudan from 1983 to 2005, when Khartoum and southern rebels signed an accord); or warfare between large, well-organized armies (China from 1927 to 1949, El Salvador from 1979 to 1992, Mozambique from 1976 to 1992, Croatia in 1991, and Angola from 1975 to 2002). Some unlucky countries have had combinations of all the above â the Congo is the best example. Sometimes we cannot tell if a civil war has started until long after the fact, when a minor conflict that has gone on for years suddenly spikes into large-scale violence. Conversely, it is sometimes hard to know when a civil war ends, as wars can turn into long-lasting minor insurgencies, like the conflict between Indonesian security forces and the Free Papua Movement. Whatâs more, civil wars are sometimes limited to peripheral areas (as in Ugandaâs war against the Lordâs Resistance Army) or they can engulf the whole country, as in Greece (1944 to 1949) or Bosnia (1992 to 1995). In some countries â like Chad, Colombia and Myanmar, which have been in and out of civil war for more than 40 years â civil war becomes a fact of life rather than an anomaly. The question of whether a country has fallen into civil war is often deliberately muddied for political reasons. States avoid using the term to play down the level of opposition to them. Thus, for example, the Kenyan âshiftaâ war of the 1960âs against secessionist Somalis in the Northern Frontier District may have technically been a small civil war, but in the historiography of the country and in the minds of many Kenyans, it was just banditry (âshiftaâ means bandit) or a border conflict with Somalia. But if the term âcivil warâ seeks to convey the condition of a divided society engaged in destructive armed conflict, then Iraq sadly fits the bill. Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds together have managed to create 40 or so political parties and dozens of militias in two years of sovereign rule. The insurgency started while Iraq was under foreign occupation, but it intensified since the handoff of sovereignty. The insurgents have been fighting continuously, violence affects all sides and there have been more than 30,000 civilian and military deaths, dwarfing the median number of 18,000 deaths for all civil wars since 1945. In addition, sectarian violence is uprooting ever larger numbers of Iraqis. On Thursday, the Iraqi government reported that in the previous week alone, more than 1,000 families had left integrated areas for Shiite or Sunni strongholds. Fighting a civil war is the way that some societies build a state, and it is hard to imagine how there could have been a smooth transition from Saddam Husseinâs dictatorship. Still, the United States has clearly helped to create the conditions for Iraqâs descent into civil war. Two failures are worth noting. First, a large literature on contentious politics has shown that violent opposition groups gain legitimacy and public support when the state uses indiscriminate violence or abuses civilians. This is precisely what has happened in Iraq, with recent reports of civilian abuses by the coalition. Second, civil war studies have shown that insurgencies grow into large wars when insurgents receive external assistance. The American-led coalition simply has not had the manpower to quarantine those Iraqis who have reportedly received assistance from neighboring countries and international terrorist entities. What can be done? History shows that the one way to build peace after a civil war is through a decisive victory â something thatâs easier said than done. Negotiated settlements can also produce a lasting peace, but durable settlements like those in Cambodia, Mozambique and El Salvador usually come after long wars (10 years on average). And the United Nations can help, but only after an agreement has been reached. The United Nations cannot win wars, but it can shore up the foundation for a peace. More than a third of civil wars restart within five years and Iraq has many risk factors: a dependence on oil, a population polarized along religious lines, meddlesome neighbors, no democratic traditions and a long history of violent conflict. But there is also good news. Iraq is better off than many countries in the midst of a civil war: its income is relatively high, it has an educated populace and it can count on abundant foreign assistance if fighting ends. Whether these factors will help to bring an end to the conflict in Iraq is an open question. What is no longer an open question, however, is the nature of the conflict. It is a civil war, not an insurgency. Nicholas Sambanis, an associate professor of political science at Yale, is the co-author of âMaking War and Building Peace: United Nations Peace Operations.â .
. August 4, 2006 SouthAmerica: I have been mentioning that Iraq would turn into a Yugoslavia after Titoâs death since before the United States invaded Iraq in 2003. You did not have to be a rocket scientist to see the Iraq civil war coming if Saddam was removed from power. I have been writing about the Iraq civil war for a long time, but as usual the US mainstream media takes a long time to catch on â on whatâs going on around the world including in Iraq. ********************* âIraqi civil war has already begun, U.S. troops sayâ By Tom Lasseter The Mercury News â August 4, 2006 McClatchy Newspapers BAGHDAD, Iraq - While American politicians and generals in Washington debate the possibility of civil war in Iraq, U.S. officers and enlisted men who patrol Baghdad daily say it has already begun. Army troops in and around Baghdad interviewed in the last week cite a long list of evidence that the center of the nation is coming undone: Villages have been abandoned by Sunni and Shiite Muslims; Sunni insurgents have killed thousands of Shiites in car bombings and assassinations; Shiite militia death squads have tortured and killed hundreds, if not thousands, of Sunnis; and when night falls, neighborhoods become open battlegrounds. "There's one street that's the dividing line. They shoot mortars across the line and abduct people back and forth," said 1st Lt. Brian Johnson, a 4th Infantry Division platoon leader from Houston, describing the nightly battleground that pits Sunni gunmen from the Ghazaliyah neighborhood against Shiite gunmen from the Shula district. As he spoke, the sights and sounds of battle grew: first, the rat-a-tat-tat of fire from AK-47 assault rifles, then the heavier bursts of PKC machine guns, and finally the booms of mortar rounds crisscrossing the night sky and crashing down onto houses and roads. The bodies of captured Sunni and Shiite fighters will turn up in the morning, dropped in canals and left on the side of the road. "We've seen some that have been executed on site, with bullet holes in the ground; the rest were tortured and executed somewhere else and dumped," Johnson said. The recent assertion by U.S. soldiers here that Iraq is in a civil war is a stunning indication that American efforts to bring peace and democracy to Iraq are failing, more than three years after the toppling of dictator Saddam Hussein's regime. Some Iraqi troops, too, share that assessment. "This is a civil war," said a senior adviser to the commander of the Iraqi Army's 6th Division, which oversees much of Baghdad. "The problem between Sunnis and Shiites is a religious one, and it gets worse every time they attack each other's mosques," said the adviser, who gave only his rank and first name, Col. Ahmed, because of security concerns. "Iraq is now caught in hell." U.S. hopes for victory in Iraq hinge principally on two factors: Iraqi security forces becoming more competent and Iraqi political leaders persuading armed groups to lay down their weapons. But neither seems to be happening. The violence has increased as Iraqi troops have been added, and feuding among the political leadership is intense. American soldiers, particularly the rank and file who go out on daily patrols, say they see no end to the bloodshed. Higher ranking officers concede that the developments are threatening to move beyond their grasp. "There's no plan - we are constantly reacting," said a senior American military official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. "I have absolutely no idea what we're going to do." The issue of whether Iraq has descended into civil war has been a hot-button topic even before U.S. troops entered Iraq in 2003, when some opponents of the war raised the likelihood that Iraq would fragment along sectarian lines if Saddam's oppressive regime was removed. Bush administration officials consistently rejected such speculation as unlikely to come to fruition. On Thursday, however, two top American generals told the Senate Armed Services Committee that Iraq could slip into civil war, though both stopped well short of saying that one had begun. Political sensitivity has made some officers here hesitant to use the words "civil war," but they aren't shy about describing the situation that they and their men have found on their patrols. "I hate to use the word `purify,' because it sounds very bad, but they are trying to force Shiites into Shiite areas and Sunnis into Sunni areas," said Lt. Col. Craig Osborne, who commands a 4th Infantry Division battalion on the western edge of Baghdad, a hotspot of sectarian violence. Osborne, 39, of Decatur, Ill., compared Iraq to Rwanda, where hundreds of thousands of people were killed in an orgy of inter-tribal violence in 1994. "That was without doubt a civil war - the same thing is happening here. "But it's not called a civil war - there's such a negative connotation to that word and it suggests failure," he said. On the other side of Baghdad, Shiites from the eastern slum of Sadr City and Sunnis from the nearby neighborhood of Adhamiyah regularly launch incursions into each other's areas, setting off car bombs and dragging victims into torture chambers. "The sectarian violence flip-flops back and forth," said Lt. Col. Paul Finken, who commands a 101st Airborne Division task force that works with Iraqi soldiers in the area. "We find bodies all the time - bound, tortured, shot." The idea that U.S. forces have been unable to prevent the nation from sliding into sectarian chaos troubles many American military officials in Iraq. Lt. Col. Chris Pease, 48, the deputy commander for the 101st Airborne's brigade in eastern Baghdad, was asked whether he thought that Iraq's civil war had begun. "Civil war," he said, and then paused for several moments. "You've got to understand," said Pease, of Milton-Freewater, Ore., "you know, the United States Army and most of the people in the United States Army, the Marine Corps and the Air Force and the Navy have never really lost at anything." Pease paused again. "Whether it is there or not, I don't know," he said. Pressed for what term he would use to describe the security situation in Iraq, Pease said: "Right now I would say that it's more of a Kosovo, ethnic-cleansing type thing - not ethnic cleansing, it is a sectarian fight - they are bombing; they are threatening to get them off the land." A human rights report released last month by the United Nations mission in Baghdad said 2,669 civilians were killed across Iraq during May, and 3,149 were killed in June. In total, 14,338 civilians were killed from January to June of this year, and 150,000 civilians were forced out of their homes, the report said. Pointing to a map, 1st Lt. Robert Murray, last week highlighted a small Shiite village of 25 homes that was abandoned after a flurry of death threats came to town on small pieces of paper. "The letters tell them if they don't leave in 48 hours, they'll kill their entire families," said Murray, 29, of Franklin, Mass. "It's happening a lot right now. There have been a lot of murders recently; between that and the kidnappings, they're making good on their threats. ... They need to learn to live together. I'd like to see it happen, but I don't know if it's possible." Riding in a Humvee later that day, Capt. Jared Rudacille, Murray's commander in the 4th Infantry Division, noted the market of a town he was passing through. The stalls were all vacant. The nearby homes were empty. There wasn't a single civilian car on the road. "Between 1,500 and 2,000 people have moved out," said Rudacille, 29, of York, Pa. "I now see only 15 or 20 people out during the day." The following evening, 1st Lt. Corbett Baxter was showing a reporter the area, to the west of where Rudacille was, that he patrols. "Half of my entire northern sector cleared out in a week, about 2,000 people," said Baxter, 25, of Fort Hood, Texas. Staff Sgt. Wesley Ramon had a similar assessment while on patrol between the Sunni town of Abu Ghraib and Shula, a Shiite stronghold. The main bridge leading out of Shula was badly damaged recently by four bombs placed underneath it. Military officials think the bombers were Sunnis trying to stanch the flow of Shiite militia gunmen coming out of Shula to kill Sunnis. "It's to the point of being irreconcilable; you know, we've found a lot of bodies, entire villages have been cleared out, we get reports of entire markets being gunned down - and if that's not a marker of a civil war, I don't know what is," said Ramon, 33, of San Antonio, Texas. Driving back to his base, Johnson watched a long line of trucks and cars go by, packed with families fleeing their homes with everything they could carry: mattresses, clothes, furniture, and, in the back of some trucks, bricks to build another home. "Every morning that we head back to the patrol base, this is all we see," Johnson said. "These are probably people who got threatened last night." In Taji, an area north of Baghdad, where the roads between Sunni and Shiite villages have become killing fields, many soldiers said they saw little chance that things would get better. "I don't think there's any winning here. Victory for us is withdrawing," said Sgt. James Ellis, 25, of Chicago. "In this part of the world they have been fighting for 3,000 years, and we're not going to fix it in three." .
No, you don't need to be a rocket scientist to see that arabs can only live in peace if ruled with an iron fist by a ruthless dictator like Saddam. If left alone they start killing each other. But of course it's the Israelis and Americans who are the bad guys.