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03/19/2006:

"The burning question of the day"

The BBC asks this morning, "does Iraq qualify for the definition of civil war?" Do five out of seven pundits agree? There is apparently in the minds of UK Defense Minister Reid and Rumsfeld a vast chasm between 'sectarian conflict' and 'civil war'. What's the dif? Is there a critical mass of carnage--should we be getting out our Final Four-style scorecards?

When Rumsfeld finally figures out the 'plan', will he declare civil war? Of all the horrific absurdities of this war, this bizarre debate is way up there. What difference does it make to people on the ground what we call it? Again, it's a struggle about who gets to call what what. Allawi says it's a civil war, but this is dismissed as political opportunism. What about Bush and Blair's political stake in insisting it's not?

What everybody has to understand is that WE are the namers and the doers, the only legitimate agents on the scene. 'Clearly defined groups engaged in sectarian warfare...' that's the political definition, and since WE have decided that hasn't happened yet, it isn't happening period.

Yes it is, no it's not: how much ink has been spilled on the right and left in the West as they wrangle to characterize Iraq's long decline?

I always found it crazy that the U.S. appeared to support the Shia for these past three years: they wanted an Islamist theocracy then? Their interests dovetail with Iran's? I knew that couldn't be so. Now things have settled into a more comprehensible picture: Saddam's Baathists are of course our natural allies. Like attracts like after all. Funny what blowing the dome off a mosque can do.

While we engage this burning question of the day with our panels of experts, our Orientalists who have engaged in this sort of prurience for 300 years anyway, tortured bodies are popping up everywhere like dandelions, families are fleeing their homes for their lives, and people are blowing up.

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