Here is an interesting observation about the Iraqi "Civil War" subject. The Belmont Club describes how Saddam Hussein had to keep the underlying tribal conflicts that we are seeing today at rest while he was in power.
One of the reasons both the US and the EU hesitated to intervene in Slobodan Milosevic's genocide in the Balkans was because it was characterized as a "civil war"; a conflict of immemorial hatreds in which it would be useless to intervene. Even at his speech marking the Dayton accords, President Clinton portrayed events in the Balkans, not as the result of an organized conspiracy revolving around Slobodan Milosevic, but from an underlying geopolitical fault. "When I took office, some where urging immediate intervention in the conflict. I decided that American ground troops should not fight a war in Bosnia because the United States could not force peace on Bosnia's warring ethnic groups, the Serbs, Croats and Muslims."
Not unsurprisingly, the same civil war theme has been used to describe the lack of options in Darfur. ...
The power of the "civil war" theme is that it provides an automatic rationale for withdrawing from the fray, especially if intervention is supposed to have 'caused it' in the first place. Rebranding Iraq as a civil war puts it in the same category of hopelessness as the former Yugoslavia and the Sudan.
It's not a civil war, yet. Stay in touch through the reputable Iraqi blog Iraq The Model. These guys have been reporting from Baghdad since the war begin. They have also visited the US and met with President Bush.
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As former interim PM Iyad Allawi recently stated "If this is not civil war, then god knows what civil war is"
three years & counting
more than 2100 US deaths
Let us not make the mistake of thinking that the people in this country who are declaring that civil war has erupted in Iraq are concerned about our military personnel. To them, this has nothing to do with the war but everything to do with President Bush. What scares me and saddens me more than anything with the scare mongers on the left is the hatred they have for a human being. In this case, the President. The left hates Bush. Just plain hate him. Nothing is barred in thier little minds if the end result is ousting the President. I for one refuse to listen to any arguement from any side whose main thrust is from hatred. The left offer no resolution, other than to cut and run. Nothing. They have nothing to offer, and haven't for a long time, except criticism and hatred for a man. For a group of people who supposedly are so peaceloving, thier hatred sends up a big, red flag for me. Civil war in Iraq? It will take more than the drumbeat of the left to convince me of that. Problems in Iraq? Of course, but what country wouldn't have problems after years of supression and then given the opportunity to live in freedom?
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