Ummmm, Can I Answer That Question...?

John Burns: Civil

War in Iraq Already

Here?

By E&P Staff Link
Published: July 24, 2005 10:00 AM ET

NEW YORK In one of the more startling recent mainstream commentaries from Iraq, John F. Burns of The New York Times suggested today that perhaps those who fear a dreaded civil war breaking out there ought to just take a good look around: It might already be here.

He wrote this before another suicide bomber caused havoc at a Baghdad police station today, killing at least 20. Also today, members of former Prime Minister Ayad Allawi's bloc threatened to walk out of the constitutional drafting committee in support of a Sunni group that boycotted the process. One committee member criticized the way the commission dealt with Sunni members' decision to suspend their participation in drafting the new charter.

In a news report, meanwhile, The Times' Dexter Filkins opened with this statement: "They just keep getting stronger. Despite months of assurances that their forces were on the wane, the guerrillas and terrorists battling the American-backed enterprise here appear to be growing more violent, more resilient and more sophisticated than ever."

He also offers this quote, seemingly coming from the Vietnam era, but actually from a senior Army intelligence officer: "We are capturing or killing a lot of insurgents. But they're being replaced quicker than we can interdict their operations. There is always another insurgent ready to step up and take charge."

Burns' piece, appearing in the Times' Week in Review section, provided this "civil war" context:

"From the moment American troops crossed the border 28 months ago, the specter hanging over the American enterprise here has been that Iraq, freed from Mr. Hussein's tyranny, might prove to be so fractured - by politics and religion, by culture and geography, and by the suspicion and enmity sown by Mr. Hussein's years of repression - that it would spiral inexorably into civil war.

"If it did, opponents of the American-led invasion had warned, American troops could get caught in the crossfire between Sunnis and Shiites, Kurds and Turkmen, secularists and believers - reduced, in the grimmest circumstances, to the common target of a host of contending militias.

"Now, events are pointing more than ever to the possibility that the nightmare could come true. Recent weeks have seen the insurgency reach new heights of sustained brutality. The violence is ever more centered on sectarian killings, with Sunni insurgents targeting hundreds of Shiite and Kurdish civilians in suicide bombings. There are reports of Shiite death squads, some with links to the interior ministry, retaliating by abducting and killing Sunni clerics and community leaders.

"The past 10 days have seen such a quickening of these killings, particularly by the insurgents, that many Iraqis are saying that the civil war has already begun.

"That at least some senior officials in Washington understand the gravity of the situation seems clear from remarks made at the Foreign Press Center in Washington two weeks ago by Zalmay Khalilzad, who arrives in Baghdad this week to begin as Mr. Negroponte's successor. In his remarks, Mr. Khalilzad abandoned a convention that had bound senior American officials when speaking of Iraq - to talk of civil war only if reporters raised it first, and then only to dismiss it as a beyond-the-fringe possibility."


E&P Staff (letters@editorandpublisher.com)

---The Answer is YES Civil War has ALREADY began in Iraq.

I know many people did not get the memo to the suicide bombing that was SUPPOSED to be targeting two American SOLDIERS YET wound up killing over 30 Iraqi children.About two weeks ago. If you were following this site you are up on it ,if not check in our recent archives for the photos...

ANYWAY..you must understand what the BOMBER saw. He did not kill himself for TWO American soldiers.

He killed himself to strike the children.

Let me repeat that...THAT BOMBER TARGETED THE CHILDREN OF IRAQ. Not the soldiers. WHY...?

Because it IS Civil War. And genocide is the only way they can repress certain populations.

Civil War has began there. I am not surprised the rest of the world, even my own journalists and countrymen, are reluctant to say so. ---