Civil War: No Other Name For It

This morning in the Guardian, there was a disturbing story of an Iraqi fleeing the country in fear of reprisals for reporting body counts. According to the story, there have been some 7000 bodies brought to the morgue in Baghdad in the past several months.

"The vast majority of bodies showed signs of summary execution - many with their hands tied behind their back. Some showed evidence of torture, with arms and leg joints broken by electric drills," said John Pace, the Maltese UN official. The killings had been happening long before the bloodshed after last week's bombing of the Shia shrine in Samarra.

Is this not a civil war? And if it's not, then help me find the words to describe it.

I'm trying to remember when I first began reading about the men kidnapped and then found later dumped in some river or some parking lot. I seem to remember it began as early as last summer. I'm sure that I have read about these executions before last week, I know that this has not begun with the bombing of a shrine, but has been building for many months. As America has attempted to stand the Iraqi Army up so that we may stand down, we have inadvertently, by the very fact of our incompetence, armed and trained the soldiers who are now on a mission of vengeance and mayhem. This civil war did not begin last week, the violence has merely escalated to the point that our press, embedded in the vacuum of the Green Zone, can no longer ignore it.

Maybe what's happened here is not a sudden outbreak of violence, but a building of tensions and violence that we've ignored because the Administration continues to lie and paint happy pictures, and our press doesn't know any better, so they report the things the Army tells them. We citizens can only know what we're told, but in the age of instant information, we have a responsibility to ask tough questions and say the words that those in the Green Zone are afraid to utter. And who can blame them? If I were in Iraq right now, if it were my job, and there were no way for me to leave, I'd be painting a real pretty picture right now, I'd paint it better than fucking Monet. But we are responsible for our soldiers, those kids that we have sent to die for our stupidity, and our responsibility as the neighbors and parents, and the people who can read, is to get them out.

What the fuck do you think 140,000 soldiers will do when the civil war wages out of control, and it is too late to evacuate? And how long do you think we can hold on? How long will we refuse to admit that we've lost control? Will we keep these young people, the children of Americans, in the middle of the killing fields until it is too late?

It's already too late.

And if you don't see that, just go back to watching the Simpsons. Tell Marge I said hi.

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