The Iraqis will come up with a name for it later, but of course it's a civil war. There's the persistent killing, the organized factions inside and outside of government, and the marginalization of all moderates.

I am sure that people on the ground there (outside of the Emerald City) will also confirm that the definitions of us and them are solidifying, with territories staked out geographically and within the "government."

If you've got shooting too, ain't that a civil war?

Great post. It really bothers me that so many people have a moral calculus that hugely discounts the loss of Iraqi lives over American lives. It also bothers me that this "sectarian violence" is only now getting covered. It's been going on in Iraq for more than the last 24 months--"neighborhood killings"--as one NPR reporter said, but not covered because car bombs are so much more dramatic.

Many will never get their heads around the fact that this war is immoral. If they were truely Christian, or spiritual, or whatever, then they should be appalled that our tax dollars, name, and international reputation have been spent on such a shameful event.

could someone explain to me how an "insurgency" is somehow not a "civil war"?

Cheney sees "no evidence of civil war (in Iraq)" so, that would preclude an "incipient" idiocy breaking out in the Bush administration? It is a given that "low-level" idiocy was running the Bush administration all along. However when one applies a Frank Luntz spin to the Bush idiocy, one embraces a high level of actual incompetence and crass insanity. That would then equate Iraq to being a classic variant of "quagmire." Does anyone with even half a brain in American government listen to Rep. John Murtha? They really should you know.

Similar to Kos... is a fellow named Yankee Doodle
who runs the site "Today in Iraq."

He has an ancillary post up today that is must reading.

I think we're seeing civil war-related program activities.

Deaths per day, month or year as a percentage of population might be an interesting metric.

based on rough figures, factoring the U.S. Civil War lasted from Jan 1861 - May 1865, and 184,584 combined deaths (http://www.cwc.lsu.edu/cwc/other/stats/warcost.htm) we lost around 114 people a day. And that is with a total combined (Union & Conf) population of 34.3 million, roughly 10 million more (37% more) people than Iraq. In a nation of Iraq's size (~25 mil) the U.S. Civil War death ratio correlates to about 83/day.

The fascist warmongers, profiteers, incompetent chickenhawks, rapturist fanatics, and disinformation warriors in the Bush government are not only pathological liars, - they have no ears.

Next, the Bush government will have Americans believe Bush is a bold and decisive man of business acumen, a uniter, not a divider, a compassionate conservative, who communicated directly with gog - I mean some god, - and then we are to believe Iraq and Saddam were responsible for, or involved in 9/11, that Iraq is awash in WMD our great military is certain to unearth any day now, that Iraq and Saddam has operation ties with their sworn jihadist enemies in al Quaida, - and that freedom is on the march, we're making progress, the terrorists are in their last throes, and the duplicitous American haters and jihadist mass murder gang funders and nurturers in the House of Saud are "good friends' of America.

Deliver us from evil!

Ben hit the nail on the head. I'd meant to suggest the relative mortality rate would be informative.

I think we're seeing civil war-related program activities.

Posted by dogfacegeorge at March 21, 2006 11:49 AM

Made me laugh, dogfacegeorge. I fell bad that I can laugh about such a dark topic...

Picking up Ben's thread, there must be a mind-set that pictures a "civil war" as one where two opposing groups of troops are faced in battle, each wearing a different uniform, e.g., blue and grey.

Steve,

Thanks for running the picture of Kos in uniform.
Given all of the mud that is thrown at Kos and the
DailyKos blog and it's readers, it good to remind
people that Kos is a patriot who has demonstrated
his committement to his country by serving in the
armed forces. This is not to say that this is the
only way a citizen can act on their patriotism
but it is good to remind people, especially
the Chickenhawks, that there are ardent dissenters
who have worn the military uniform. In fact,
an increasing number of these dissenters are
retired generals.

Ian

Why won't Bush speak about the bases being built?
Why isn't he aggressively questioned about them?

Long-term bases planned
"The U.S. military has identified 14 locations for long-term bases in Iraq, many of which were formerly used by the Iraqi military."

Sources: GlobalSecurity.org, Tribune reporting

"...Quite literally multi-billions of dollars have gone into them. In a prestigious engineering magazine in late 2003, Lt. Col. David Holt, the Army engineer "tasked with facilities development" in Iraq, was already speaking proudly of several billion dollars being sunk into base construction ("the numbers are staggering"). Since then, the base-building has been massive and ongoing."

"In a country in such startling disarray, these bases, with some of the most expensive and advanced communications systems on the planet, are like vast spaceships that have landed from another solar system. Representing a staggering investment of resources, effort, and geostrategic dreaming, they are the unlikeliest places for the Bush administration to hand over willingly to even the friendliest of Iraqi governments."

http://www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?pid=59774

This is as close as Bush comes:

Asked about a timetable for the full withdrawal of US troops, President Bush said: "That of course is an objective and that will be decided by future presidents and future governments of Iraq."

Viet Nam 1962-1972, 60,000 casualties. About 16 a day. Not a civil war, but typically refered to as a "war".

Susan!
Did you ever get the uneasy feeling that Bush doesn't intend to lose the next election, either?

Someone he trusts has gotta run those bases...

George Bush says that Iraq is doing fine despite Iraqis being subjected to''savage acts of violence''. Here's one such act:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world
/middle_east/4827424.stm

Kos? As an expert on civil war per his childhood experience and two years (peacetime) in the Army?

Well I have seen it all now. I think a picture and article of an actual America back from Iraq would have been a more respectable choice.

For some time lately, after lurking on blogs for 4 years, I have gotten the feeling that bloggers, like congress, are some incest family dedicated to promoting each other instead of discussing American interest...much like the news shows that are all about the talking heads, not the news.

God save America from the lunatic lefites, the lunatic righties and the self promotion of the crumb gathers that live off the political game and that have replaced all real discussion of America.

No WMD, no genocide, no science, no free speach, no privacy rights, no women's rights, no independent judiciary, no legal ristrictions, no international respect, no integrity, no torture, no corruption, no ethics, no ethics committee, no leadership, no diplomacy, no honesty, no integrity, no foresight, no plan, no solutions, ........no civil war! Everything is perfect.....honest!
Don't you guys watch FOX?

Carroll--

Where do I begin? If the post is about war, why not picture a solidier? And this comment:

"and two years (peacetime) in the Army?"

blows me away. Did you see what years he served? Were you in a coma in January 1991? Have you heard of Iraq? So yes, he is an American back from Iraq.

Let's have that Boy King piece of shit say what he said at his press conference today defending his choice to invade Iraq, let's have him defend himself with that reasoning at a trial for treason and the slam dunk Execution of this War Criminal will shatter the glass backboard. Or, perhaps he's going for an insanity defense. He's either Evil or insane; whichever, take his Satanic head!

Naaaaaahhhh, you people are just under estimating the duration of a "last throe".

Iraq has a population of 26 million, so 50-60 deaths per day there is roughly equivalent to 600-700 deaths per day in the US with our population of 300 million.

So, if 600-700 people were dying daily in the US due to intergroup strife--say the Christian fundamentalists and the secular humanists finally decide to duke it out--would we call that a civil war?

Naw, this little dust-up in Iraq is more like the feud between the Earps and the Clantons, or maybe the Hatfields and the McCoys...or not.

I can't imagine any town, or nation, enduring a shootout at the OK Corral every day, especially a shootout that is killing so many people on a daily basis.

So the shootout at the Iraq Corral is really a civil war being waged in a very uncivil, bloodthirsty manner...with no end in sight.

Many Iraqis (over a million?) have fled the shootout at the Iraq Corral. Many Iraqi Christian and Muslim professionals have fled to neighboring countries.

Iraq is splitting apart before our very eyes. And I believe, at least in the foreseeable future, that Iraq will look like the following:

U.S. forces will continue to try to disengage from Iraqi cities, turning control of Iraqi cities over to "Iraqi police forces" which will actually be militias fighting over who controls what. More and more Iraqis will flee. Refuge camps will spring up along Iraq's borders. U.S. forces, however, will not necessarily leave Iraq, but will instead focus more on controlling Iraq's oil resources, with the help of the mercenaries hired by private contract security firms. U.S. forces (and these mercenaries), therefore, will stick more to the permanent U.S. bases being built around Iraq, and will only participate in ground operations if the Iraq oil they are guarding is threatened.

In other words, Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld and all their duplicitous neo-con pals have already indicated through their actions (or inactions) that they don't give a damn about what happens to ordinary Iraqi citizens. Most Iraqis already realize this. They know that Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld invaded Iraq for the oil. Hell, the Oil Ministry building in Baghdad was the first (and last) building Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld "liberated" upon our troops entering Baghdad.

A western-styled democracy in Iraq? Hardly. The Iraqi tribal and sectarian battlelines are already drawn. Ultimately, whichever group is the most bloodthirsty and brutal will crush all opposition...except for the Kurds in the north. In the future, I see the Kurds assuming the role that the Northern Alliance had in Afghanistan, while everything to their south in Iraq will be ruled by a group of sharia-spouting religious terrorists with their "morality police" enforcing their brutal and bloodthirsty form of Islam on all Iraqi citizens still remaining under their control.

Which means in the near future, the U.S. will have to be on alert to catch any terrorist training camps springing up in Iraq, like the terrorist training camps that appeared under the Taliban in Afghanistan before 9/11.

Such, my friends, is the horrible Bush War legacy.

What a mess.

It's remarkable to see serious people like Steve being "actors" on a theatre of the absurd with its MISE EN SCENE that Iraq is in civil war. Only by a leaping, and intellectually the crudest, redefinition of civil war, can one claim that this is one of the "deadliest civil wars". That is, you can include in this redefinition the actions of terrorists who target mainly innocent civilians-not as collateral casualties-and blow them up by means of car bombs, as well as blowing up their churches. But the latter, killing civilians and blowing up churches are techniques the Zarqawi terrorists use to foment civil war, but not civil war. Hence, Clemons and Kos confuse the techniques of fomenting civil war with civil war itself.

The combatants in any civil war aim to kill their enemies in as great numbers as possible, while they make sure that they can win a major part of the civilian population to their cause. It's only by having the support of the latter that either side of the belligerents can be victorious in such a war. Not by alienating the population from their cause as the insurgents presently do in their desperation to foment civil war.

Kos's attempt to gauge a civil war by the numbers killed within a time span, is laughable, and shows him to be bereft of gray matter. That Clemons has fallen to this sleight of hand presentation of Kos of Iraq's insurgency as civil war is deeply depressing. No future civil war can be identified or gauged by a retrospective example of a civil war, as Kos's example of El Salvador is. No one can predict, and Kos is no modern Tiresias, the time span of a civil war. Hence the numbers that Kos presents, and to which regrettably Clemons pays his obeisance, are ciphers and do not contribute to his argument at all.

The conflict in Iraq is a civil war only for those who still play with "tin soldiers". Clemons in his rush to pull the curtains down on this "debate", makes him completely unqualified to be employed as a stage hand opening the curtains to a burlesque show.

Go to my blog for more:
http://congeorgekotzabasis.blogspot.com

Totally OT, but I'm surprised how young Kos looks on that picture. Strongly reminds me of that mexican boy joining the army in that old movie 'Giants'...

"The combatants in any civil war aim to kill their enemies in as great numbers as possible, while they make sure that they can win a major part of the civilian population to their cause. It's only by having the support of the latter that either side of the belligerents can be victorious in such a war. Not by alienating the population from their cause as the insurgents presently do in their desperation to foment civil war."

It amazes me that one can actually type when their head is so deeply embedded in Cheney's posterior.

And, after reading your droolings, quoted above, why in God's name would ANYONE want to visit your blog???? "Insurgents" my ass, what will you Twilight Zoners be calling them next year? Anyone that thinks "Iraq" is better off, or not on the verge of exploding into total and irrereversable collapse, is separated from reality.

Tell me,exactly how long IS a "last throe" in Bushworld????

POA,
I don't have a link handy, but there is a joint article by John Mearsheimer and someone else on your favorite foreign policy topic. I think you'll want to read it---I'll look for it later, myself.

So why do you suppose that the United States Government has agreed to talk to Iran about Iraq?

What reason would this arrogant administration have to enter talks with Iran about Iraq?

My assessment? Iran is now more in control of the situation in Iraq than we would like them to be. Iran now holds some cards at the table. The strategic blunder continues.

You say Antietem and I say Algeria....

On NewsHour last night, James Woolsey took the Antietem-size-battles-means-civil war position, while the other guest said Iraq is indeed in a civil war.

FLYNT LEVERETT: A civil war that's being fought for the moment with relatively low-intensity means.

Mr. Woolsey is right; we're not seeing Antietam-scale battles at this point. But make no mistake: This is a communal civil war that's going on. We are having 50 or 60 killings a day, taking place almost entirely along ethnic and sectarian lines.

The reason I think the current strategy is misplaced, as Mr. Woolsey just described it, it places a very heavy emphasis on beefing up so-called Iraqi security forces to deal with this counterinsurgency problem. The real flaw in this strategy is that what we describe as Iraqi security forces are not seen as Iraqi security forces, certainly not by most Sunnis in Iraq.

MARGARET WARNER: Meaning they're seen as mostly Shiite forces?

FLYNT LEVERETT: The Iraqi army is seen as essentially a Shia and Kurdish militia with nicer uniforms and better weapons, thanks to the United States. It is not seen as a genuinely national army.

Flynt Leverett: We continue to train units almost entirely on a single-sect basis, either Kurdish or Shia units, very, very few Sunni units. And if you really are dealing with a civil war, to put that kind of force in a privileged position and give it responsibility, supposedly for national security, it is only going to inflame communal tensions and make the situation worse.

Transcript: http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/middle_east/jan-june06/iraq_3-21.html

The combatants in any civil war aim to kill their enemies in as great numbers as possible, while they make sure that they can win a major part of the civilian population to their cause. It's only by having the support of the latter that either side of the belligerents can be victorious in such a war. Not by alienating the population from their cause as the insurgents presently do in their desperation to foment civil war.

So its really a popularity contest ? Just because the inusrgents aren't popular with some segments of the population doesn't mean its not a civil war.

Remember, 9/11 changed everything. Maybe the definiton of a civil war changed too ?

There are armed militia that don't answer to the elected government opertating in Iraq. Their goal is to influence\disrupt the political situation in Iraq. There are daily carbombings, systematic executions and other forms of violence designed to influence the political situation in Iraq. Deaths are measured in double-digits on a daily basis. How is that not a civil war ?

The 60,000 deaths in Vietnam were American deaths. IIRC the Vietnamese lost more like a million people in the years of their civil war. Still, Iraq is a civil war if India post-independence, Algeria and El Salvador were civil wars. The US set-piece battle is not the norm of 20th century civil wars, unless they became proxy wars like Vietnam.

Populations:

Algeria - 32,531,853
Iraq - 26,074,906
El Salvador - 6,704,932

deaths per day Average by month March '05 to March '06

5-Mar 13.97
5-Apr 16.67
5-May 26.81
5-Jun 25.77
5-Jul 26.52
5-Aug 26.00
5-Sep 29.10
5-Oct 21.94
5-Nov 25.30
5-Dec 17.32
6-Jan 25.16
6-Feb 30.21
6-Mar 32.36

based on the totals we have collected at iCasualties.org

An NPR writein letter pointed out that, by Rumsfeld's criteria, our own Civil War wouldn't qualify as one...

There was some serious nonsense out fo Condoleezza this morning on both MTP and Late Edition. I blogged with transcripts and excerpts.

Basically, she said that Saddam was part of an ideology that contributed to 9/11 even if he did not knowingly do so. He represented the Old Middle East and we needed a New one. Of course, this "new" one looks like a hyper version of the old one.