Many observers have tiptoed to the edge of calling the situation in Iraq a civil war. Certainly
hundreds of Iraqis each month are being killed by other Iraqis. The undertakers office in Baghdad is overwhelmed. There is apparently a power vacuum, since the majority party has been
unable to form a government.
Definitions of civil war would certainly seem to be met, but many Americans can only conceive of civil war as a series of pitched military battles like those seen in the American Civil War.
Well, the Iraqis are getting there. Yesterday pitched battles developed in Ramadi and Baghdad, and US forces took a hand.
American and Iraqi troops sealed off one of Baghdad's most prominent Sunni Arab neighborhoods on Monday after a night of raging gun battles that left homes and storefronts riddled with bullets and at least one civilian dead, Iraqi officials and witnesses said.
MORE
The closing of Adhamiya, in northern Baghdad, seemed to signal deteriorating security in a neighborhood where attacks on American and Iraqi forces had ebbed in recent months. The area is home to hard-line Sunni Arabs who remain hostile to the Shiite-led government and the American presence. ...
A leading Sunni Arab political group, the Iraqi Islamic Party, released a statement on Monday calling for calm and saying that a "human disaster might occur." It said the clashes were between Iraqi government forces and residents of Adhamiya, implying that the uniformed forces were the aggressors.
At least one civilian was killed and five injured in the battles, an Interior Ministry official said.
Juan Cole writes that he has been told,
...and the Baghdad press also reports, that the real significance here was that the Shiite death squads in the ministry of interior tried to operate in force and in daylight in a Sunni Arab neighborhood. Earlier, they had had to kidnap and killa at night.
In Ramadi, an assault was made on government offices:
US troops repelled an attack yesterday by Sunni Arab insurgents who used suicide car bombs, rocket-propelled grenades, and automatic weapons in a coordinated assault against this city's main government building and two US observation posts.
Dahr Jamail concurs that this is civil war:
There had been clashes every day for four days leading up to yesterday's huge clash there, with sporadic fighting between Sunni resistance fighters and members of the two largest Shia militias. The armed wing of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, the Badr Organization, and Muqtada al-Sadr's Mehdi Army have been launching ongoing attacks against fighters in the neighborhood. There is a shorter version of this description.
Civil war.
Yet we don't hear it described as such in the corporate media, nor from the Cheney administration. Their propaganda insists that Iraq is not yet in a civil war.
But in Adhamiya, every night now for several weeks roads have been closed with tires, trunks of date palm trees and other objects to prevent "kidnappers and Shia death squads" from entering the area, according to one source, whom I'm keeping anonymous for security reasons.
His description of the fierce fighting in his neighborhood is quite different from the reporting of it in mainstream outlets....
Disturbingly, this obvious US-backed Shia militia invasion of a Sunni neighborhood may well be a prelude to what the US military is calling a "second liberation of Baghdad" which they will carry out with the Iraqi army when a new government is installed.
I don't think that such honest and informed students of history, war and government as the Scooter, the Shooter, and the Looter (aka "the Decider") will admit to it even yet, but this is a civil war. Are we waiting for, say, Pickett's Charge? Blue and Grey uniforms, white horses?