Isn't it great that we are pouring billions of dollars and sacraficing American lives holding together a country where a good chunk of the parliament stormed out of parliament because the prime minister even deigned to meet directly with the president of the country that is doing the hard work of keeping those parliamentarians safe and sound in the Green Zone? Isn't that just a ducky situation to be in?

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A song that says it all.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BqITJFGyq4s

I think Americans have a notion of a civil war as a simple battle of one side against another, since that's more or less what we had 140 years ago. But to me a civil war is any kind of open conflict between factions within one country - look at how Yugoslavia broke up. So I'd say the third item in the poll here could be effectively removed - civil wars are pretty much as bad as it gets.

Iraq has been in a civil war and the U.S.military's invasion, failed take over, and occupation is irrelevant.

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"People should not be afraid of their governments. Governments should be afraid of their people".

Worse, accoroding to the National Intelligence Estimate.

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Iraqi-on-Iraqi violence has become the primary source of conflict in the war-ravaged nation and Iraqi leaders will be "hard-pressed to achieve sustained political reconciliation" in the next 18 months, according to a summary of the National Intelligence Estimate released Friday.

The report, which was distributed to Congress on Friday and on which President Bush received a briefing Thursday, calls on all Iraqis -- Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds -- to make significant concessions to stabilize the country.

However, the summary, a nine-page declassified version of the 90-page report, makes no determination as to whether Iraq is amid a civil war.

The summary said that "civil war" is too simple a moniker to describe the situation because the violence includes "extensive Shia-on-Shia violence, al Qaeda [in Iraq] and Sunni insurgent attacks on coalition forces and widespread criminally motivated violence."

However, the term does accurately describe certain elements of the conflict, among them: "the hardening of ethno-sectarian identities, a sea change in the character of the violence, ethno-sectarian mobilization and population displacements," according to the summary.

More.

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"Ah, good taste! What a dreadful thing! Taste is the enemy of creativeness."

Pablo Picasso (1881–1973)

There was a reason why some one like Saddam was leading the country. But noooooooooooooooo Bush could not leave well enough alone. His greedy a## just had to have all of that oil. Its like a bag of angry cats over there and our guys are in the middle of it. Nice job George.

The little insignificant racist people that live just north of Greece were fairly peaceful when Tito had them under his iron-fist rule. [Psst... those were the same people who brought us World War I]

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WHYY pays their CEO $750,000 a year. So WHYY should I renew my membership? Seems they have no problems finding money and spending it unwisely.


And this is why you should donate to PACCA, not PETA:

In September, PETA made headlines in Vermont and across the nation for asking Ben & Jerry's ice cream to use human breast milk in their ice cream, instead of cow milk

1. The US invaded Iraq to take it over, not liberate it.
2. Iraq been in a state of civil war for a while, longer than the people who invaded would admit.
3. The US forces are a non-factor there and are considered in-the-way and target practice to the fighting factions.



Bring everyone home, please!

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"People should not be afraid of their governments. Governments should be afraid of their people".

Mr. Crowley, what went on in your head

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"People should not be afraid of their governments. Governments should be afraid of their people".

According to Mr. Dick Cheney, they Shiite and the Sunnis schedule play dates with their children....

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Most people do not really want freedom, because freedom involves responsibility, and most people are frightened of responsibility.
Sigmund Freud

The situation is closer to the Democratic Republic of Congo than Yugoslavia. Lots of factions (ethnic, criminal and neighboring countries) with general lawlessness. The two big differences are oil and the U.S. Military, but I don't know if that makes things better or worse. 2 to 3 million died in the DRC and the fighting spilled across borders (being partly responsible for the Rwandan genocide, with Rwandan militias still involved in the DRC) so things could still get a lot worse in Iraq.

And EastChestnut, you can't blame Yugoslavia for starting WWI for various reasons. 1) It didn't yet exist. 2) Princip was a Serb (a Bosnian Serb I think) and while Serbs obviously didn't like the Archduke, Croats and Slovenians were sorta okay with Austrian rule. 3) The war would have started anyway. It was mostly a Germany vs. France thing (and a lot of other stuff).