STING2 said:
The article states that 1,600 people have been killed in the last 6 weeks. Thats only 3 dozen people per day. In Bosnia, an average of 300 people were killed every day in a country thats one sixth the size of Iraq. Bosnia is an example of anarchy and civil war, Iraq is not! The US Military which has experience in both environments has clearly stated that Iraq is not in a state of Civil War. For it to be a civil war, you would have to have the government disband and see a massive jump in violence, at least 10 times of what it is now. Right now, the violence, in terms of civilians being killed, is no different than it was 6 months ago, a year ago, or two years ago. Bombings, shootings, and other types of random violence have been happening since 2003. Its just that since the February Mosque bombing, every time there is violence, its now labled as being sectarian in nature with little or no evidence.
i'll say it once more: the only reason Iraq is not *yet* Bosnia is because of US Troops on the ground in Iraq. basically, you're saying that because Iraq does not yet have the body count of Bosnia -- which was the worst example of European bloodshed since WW2, quite a high standard -- then everything is just dandy. a functioning government does not have 50 people die in the capital on a random Tuesday. if the government were as wonderful as you think it is, then when will Maliki deem it necessary to suppress the violence? he won't because he can't!
many Iraqi MPs think they are in a Civil War. Maliki has said that Iraq is pretty much on it's last legs: "If it fails, I don't know what the destiny of Iraq will be." and Colin Powell thinks we are in a Civil War:
[q]In between panels, I ran into Colin Powell and asked him if we are ever going to get out of Iraq. "We are," he told me, "but we're not going to leave behind anything we like because we are in the middle of a civil war."
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/arianna-huffington/powell-on-iraq-couric-on_b_24599.html
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and since we all know you believe everything that Powell says, then it must be so.
[q]Bombings, shootings, and other types of random violence have been happening since 2003. Its just that since the February Mosque bombing, every time there is violence, its now labled as being sectarian in nature with little or no evidence[/q]
oh, for goodness sake, NO ONE BELIEVES this anymore.
[q]The U.S. commander in Iraq, General George Casey, said Sunni militants in al Qaeda were stoking the sectarian violence that pits majority Shi'ites against the once-dominant Sunni minority.
"What we are seeing now as a counter to that are death squads, primarily from Shi'ite extremist groups that are retaliating against civilians," he told reporters.
"So you have both sides now attacking civilians. And that is what has caused the recent spike in violence here in Baghdad."
U.S. commanders have often been careful not to label gunmen as Shi'ites, although many of the recent attacks in Baghdad neighborhoods have been blamed by Sunnis and police on the Mehdi army militia controlled by Shi'ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr.
Sadr and his followers vigorously deny the accusations.
BIGGEST CHALLENGE
U.S. envoy Zalmay Khalilzad said sectarian violence was now the main challenge to the security forces, overtaking the three- -year-old Sunni insurgency as the biggest source of instability.
"A year ago, terrorism and the insurgency against the coalition and the Iraqi security forces were the principal sources of instability," Khalilzad said on Tuesday. "Violent sectarianism is now the main challenge."
As a result, the U.S. military is adapting its tactics to focus more on containing the sectarian violence, but Rumsfeld cautioned that the "solution is not military."
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your comparison to murders in the US is laughable -- the US has 300 million people, Iraq 25 million, and please tell me the last time we had a suicide bombing in the US. please tell me the last time we 100 people were killed in, say, Los Angeles (a city far larger than Baghdad) over 96 hours.
it's not the absence of violence that makes a government effective, it's the government's ability to create a civil society that guarantees a basic level of security to it's citizens, a society where the middle class does not flee because they fear violence. the United States has this. Northern Ireland, even in the 1970s, had this.
Iraq does not.