From: "Rich Gauszka" 

 "Gary Britt"  wrote in message
news:44184696$1{at}w3....
> There is no civil war in Iraq.  If one breaks out, I'm not so sure that
> would be bad.  If Iraq split into three nations where the Sunni's get land
> and no oil, why would that be so bad?
>
> Gary
>
>

Dang Gary that liberal mouthpiece "the Navy Times" published an
AP report that Rumsfeld is still trying to figure out what an Iraq Civil
war would look like. Maybe he should ask the people of Iraq? So will the
new buzzword for civil war be 'revolution' ?

http://www.navytimes.com/story.php?f=1-292925-1600568.php

  BAGHDAD, Iraq - Deep within the Pentagon, they're trying to piece together
a picture of an Iraqi civil war. What would it look like? Donald Rumsfeld asks.
Here on the streets of Baghdad, it looks like hell.

Corpses, coldly executed, are turning up by the minibus-load. Mortar shells
are casually lobbed into rival neighborhoods. Car bombs are killing people
wholesale, while assassins hunt them down one by one.

Is it civil war? "In Iraq it is no longer a matter of definition -
'civil war' or 'war' or 'violence' or 'terrorism.' It is all of the
above," said one familiar with all of the above, Beirut
scholar-politician Farid Khazen, a witness to Lebanon's 1975-1990 civil
war.

Phebe Marr, a historian of Iraq, hesitates to put a name to what's
happening today, a chaotic mix of anti-U.S. resistance, Sunni-Shiite
communal bloodshed, Islamic-extremist terrorism. "But it's civil
strife," said the Washington-based Marr, "and it's getting
extremely serious."

It's only a term from a dictionary, defined as a war between opposing
groups of citizens of the same country. But once media headlines begin
referring to the "Iraq civil war," it will mark not only an
escalation of vocabulary, but of international concern.

Some aren't ready for the label. "It's not a state of civil war yet,
but we're on the verge of it," said Baghdad political writer Jabir
al-Jabari. "Iraq is in the first steps toward civil war," agreed
Bassem al-Sheik, editor-in-chief of Baghdad's al-Dustor newspaper.

Rumsfeld said in Washington on Tuesday he doesn't believe a civil war has
begun here, but intelligence analysts are "trying to look for a way to
characterize what are the ingredients of a civil war, and how would you
know if there was one, and what it would look like."

American military analyst Stephen Biddle says U.S. policy-makers make a
mistake if they "miss the nature of the conflict, which in Iraq is
already a civil war between rival ethnic and sectarian groups."
Washington should work to broker a peace by allocating power and resources
- that is, oil revenues - along those same lines, said Biddle, of the
Council on Foreign Relations.

Marr, author of the 1985 book "A Modern History of Iraq," takes a
long view and sees revolution where others see civil war.

With the 2003 U.S. invasion, she said, "we have brought about two
revolutions in Iraq." One was a change of leadership, the toppling of
President Saddam Hussein. The second is a revolution in the nature of the
Iraqi state: Will it survive, or break up into separate Shiite, Sunni and
Kurdish entities?

"We occupied the country and not only removed Saddam, but the
institutions and the underpinnings of government - the Baath party and the
elite that ran the country, and the military - leaving a huge political
vacuum," she said.

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