IRAQ: CIVIL WAR OR NOT? You bet there is, as long as two opposing factions are fighting!

(Photos: Google Images)

On NBC News , 16 August 2006, it was reported the Bush Administration is publicly denying there is an on-going civil war taking place in Iraq.

But in private, there is an acknowledgment among high ranking Administration officials that just the opposite is happening, and there is great concern that a civil war is indeed occurring between the Sunni and Shiite factions. No doubt, a civil war has been present for several weeks, if not months based on the internal carnage that has been shown on and in the news media for sometime now. I want go into the number killed in the month of July alone.

However, as usual the Administration has been putting a face saving spin on the situation because to publicly admit that is the case, would be a clear an unequivocal-irreversible concession of a failure in policy and execution of the War. And that the invasion of Iraq was a grave mistake in the first place. Quite naturally, the Administration doesn’t want to provide its opponents with any more ammunition than they already have, especially coming from its own ranks.

But Administration officials forget one central point about their fellow Americans, and that is: the public is not stupid nor dumb; overly tolerant at times with blind loyalty, yes. But not stupid or dumb. Any highschool teenager, or smart grammar school eighth grader for that matter, can simply go to an English dictionary and research the definition for the term civil war; which I did.

The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, New College Edition defines the term civil war as: “A war between [factions] or regions of one country.” And the term faction is defined as: “ 1. A group of persons forming a cohesive, usually a contentious, minority within a larger group. 2.Internal conflict; dissension; conflict within an organization or nation.” As such, the general public doesn’t need an admission or proclamation from the Administration when they read about the carnage that’s occurring every day between the very two warring factions, the Sunni and Shiite, that the Administration privately concedes are indeed embroiled in a conflict, vent on killing each other day after day. Thus, metaphorically, if it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck and looks like a duck, it’s a duck.





In plain English, there is an on-going-limited-civil war in Iraq and our troops and/or coalition forces are being caught up in the middle of an ever increasing sectarian conflict.




Let’s just hope there is not a repeat of the images we all saw during the last hours of U.S. forces departure from Viet Nam in April of 1975, as people were climbing on top of the U.S. Embassy’s roof in Saigon to board helicopters trying to escape the Viet Cong.


Bottom line, is that clearly there is a civil war going on in Iraq, maybe not full scale yet, but still it’s a civil war-according to the dictionary. And the American people know this to be true, just as they are aware when their government officials are trying to bamboozle them, or simply lie to them. You decide!
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UPDATE: SHIA MILITANTS FIGHT IRAQI SOLDIERS-It was reported by UK-Metro Newspaper that six people died when fighting broke out betwen soldiers and Shia militants in Iraq's holy city of Karbala on the 15th of August. The fighting spread to other parts of the city with gunmen in civilian clothes firing AK-47 rifles and rocket-propelled grenades at army patrols. Not a civil war in Iraq?