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February 24, 2006
Civil War? Not yet, or if already, then it's almost 40 years old
There's been a lot of talk in the last 24 hours that the great ethnic civil war has begun in Iraq. Don't believe it. Things are calming down, and most of these pundits have a long history of proclaiming disaster in Iraq.
But yes, the last few days in Iraq have seen a lot of ethnic strife, provoked by what appears to be an al-Qaeda bombing of some Shiite mosques. This is the latest in a pattern of terrorist bombing clearly intended to provoke riots and ethnic fighting. It does not mean that the Sunnis and Shiites are finally boiling over into war. A more likely outcome is that this will drive a further wedge between the Sunni insurgents and the foreign al-Qaeda fighters.
Besides, if you're going to call this a civil war, then the civil war began not this week, nor in 2003, but in 1968 with the Sunni-dominated Baath party coming to power and savagely repressing both the Shiite and Kurdish populations for almost two generations. Of course, the Sunnis before that had been in pretty sad shape for a while too. Oh, wait, I seem to recall something about an ongoing strife between the Sunni and Shiite branches of Islam for hmmm, what was it? Hundreds of years?
Does that mean the fighting is definitely going to slow down now and not flare up into something bigger? No one can make guarentees, but I don't see it happening. The only thing starting here is another news cycle of Chicken Littles.
Politics by Dan at February 24, 2006 12:17 PM
Comments
I think my favorite comment on the recent bombings have been by the people who have calmly explained that it wasn't *Arabs*, of any stripe, who did it. It was the Americans and the Jews.
I have links if you're interested, but this is the official party line of Iran and of many other leaders, secular and religious.
I think it's one of the ways they're keeping the door open to stop fighting. They'll be able to 'legitimately' claim that Sunnis and Shiites weren't bombing each other at all, that it was all the American and Zionist oppressors trying to damage and fool the Arabs.
Posted by: Samantha Joy at February 25, 2006 01:19 PM