Don't EVER call it a civil war in Iraq O.K?

[Philosoraptor]

For over a year now the white house and it's media have been repeating the tedious mantra, "Iraq is NOT descending into civil war, but it will if we leave before 'the job' is finished". All the factory produced retired t.v. generals agree with all the handsome white house spokespersons that the horrific slaughter going on between the Sunnis and Shias and the 'insurgents' is not civil war, don't you DARE call it that o.k?

At what point in the not too distant future will it be acceptable to call it a civil war? It won't descend into civil war if our troops leave, it's already civil war, so give it up with the bullshit lies, people just don' t believe you anymore.

I don't care what you call it, call it whatever you wish, just get our people out of there, can't you see it's a death trap you crazy neo cons? Oh, that's right, you only pop into the green zone every now and then so you can say, "I've recently visited Iraq and everything's just ducky". Just get our people out of there, like right now, like yesterday even, and stop telling us there is such a thing as a plan for victory when you know it's impossible you assholes.

[ixion]

1. OGSAIBIET

"the ongoing global struggle against instability, brutality, intolerance, extremism and terrorism."

...the OGSAIBIET, for short. ;-)

[Another Bill C.]

2. According to our Paper it is a civil war

St. Paul Pioneer Press

"Shiites take revenge as civil war worsens"

[Phredicles]

3. See, they have the beards but not the Blue and Gray uniforms;

so it's not a true civil war yet...

[scarletwoman]

4. Read this: "Anatomy of a Civil War" by Nir Rosen

I posted it here

More excerpts:

Rather than remaking the Middle East, the Iraq war has destabilized it. Sunnis throughout the region who already have so many reasons to hate the United States—Abu Ghraib, the Haditha massacre, the rape and murder of an Iraqi girl, Guantánamo—would now have one more, for the Americans would have handed Iraq over to the Shias. We are seeing the death throes, not the birth pangs, of a new Middle East.


The Bush administration persists in its assertions of progress and clings to the idea that something called victory is possible. What victory? By every measure, life is worse for the Iraqis (leaving aside the Kurds, who don’t want to be Iraqis anyway). They are dying by the dozens or the hundreds every day—nobody even knows how many, since the Anbar province and much of the south, and even much of Baghdad, are black holes, with no information coming out. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis have died violently since the war began, probably eclipsing the number of Saddam’s victims. The ministry of health was recently ordered again not to disclose the number of casualties. The United Nations’ torture expert has stated that torture in Iraq is now worse than it was under Saddam. Over 1.5 million Iraqis have fled their country, to Jordan, Syria, and Egypt, and in late 2006 one European official in Syria estimated that up to 3,000 Iraqis a day were fleeing into that country.

SCIRI’s calls for a Shia superstate have grown more strident, and Sunnis have made their own demands. Already in March 2006 Harith al Dhari reminded the rest of Iraqis that Sunnis had means of their own available: just as there was oil in the south, there was water in the center and the north, and it could be held off until “the barrel of water in the south was worth a barrel of oil,” or it could flood the south and drown it. More recently, maps have been circulating on Sunni Iraqi Web sites showing an enlarged Anbar province including Baghdad, Mosul, and the so-called Sunni Triangle in a large Sunni superstate. Iraqi comedians joke about different neighborhoods of Baghdad becoming their own republics. Iraq is dying, falling apart.

America did this to Iraq. We divided Iraqis. We set them at war with each other. The least we can do is stop killing them and leave Iraq.

(from "Anatomy of a Civil War -- Iraq’s descent into chaos" by Nir Rosen, published in the November/December 2006 issue of Boston Review)

sw

[Rageneau]

5. How about calling it an Uncivil War?

[Philosoraptor]

6. ---------------