Civil war?
Things look rather differently from Europe, or at least what the media
is telling us does. According to Channel 4 News in Britain, Iraq 'is descending
into' civil war - cf Bernard Guetta's 'C’est à un début de guerre civile auquel on assiste désormais en Irak (sic)'.
Even the BBC (World Service) initially described the curfew as a panic measure,
then, when the violence continued (on Saturday, I think) said, 'If even a
curfew can't stop the violence...'
'Civil war', like so many other expressions is a code: it means the Shi'a
finally responding to provocation and taking it out on Sunnis, who may well
be innocent of any involvement in the insurgency (let's stick with that word
for now).
After the bombing of the Askariya shrine, this undoubtedly happened, though
al-Qaeda propagandists seem to have exaggerated the scale, for example, from
22 Sunni mosques attacked to 100: according to one US Army source quoted
by the BBC, they had reports of mosques being attacked and found that nothing
had happened.
Now it seems mostly to have gone back to the pattern that is so familiar
from the last two and a half years: attacks that the European media would
describe as terrorist if they happened anywhere other than Iraq, targeted
mainly at the Shi'a.
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