Wednesday, August 1, 2007

You wouldn't have known it if you watched the local news tonight . . .


... but it looks like full on civil war in Iraq. The Sunnis have left the Iraq government and as this story reports, the government has crumbled. I heard it on NPR in the car this evening and when I went to find it on the internet(s), it was rather hard to find. I will also comment on the fact that the reporter called them sonnies (as in your grandmother calling someone their son's son). But I digress. How the hell did this get buried?! For fuck-sake, we are now involved in a full blown civil war. "If we don't know our history we are bound to repeat it." Hello W, didn't the South denounce our government prior to the secession?

4 comments:

codown2earth said...

JB drove Penny Lane this week so the dial found it's way to Air America which also reported this news but all I could find on the tv networks was the bridge crumbling in MN. Hmmmmm... I bet somewhere on the "internets" there is a site who has suggested a link.

Anonymous said...

I did find a story this morning in the freedom-hating New York Times.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/02/world/middleeast/02iraq.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

ChristianLiberalChick said...

Thar's no cival war...that's jest a lii sumbudy's tellin' y'all. I'm sur once we git more troops in I-rack it'll settle down.

Dumbass. Shall we say we told you so? Nah...the Dem's are still sitting on their hands to protect their political futures. Who'd they threaten or pay to keep this stuff quiet. When people ask how we let Hitler rule or Vietnam happen, they'll have to add Iraq to the list.

Andrew Oh-Willeke said...

In fairness the use of the word "government" in this case of "government crumbles" is a term of art. In this sense, "government" means a particular roster of cabinet ministers backed by a particular set of political parties in parliament, and "government crumbles" means that the parliamentary coalition currently in place has dissolved itself because some political parties of have the coalition. This means that either a new coalition must be formed and receive parliamentary approval from existing members of parliament, or if no compromise can be reached by existing members of parliament that new elections for members of parliament must be held early.

More to the point, in this context, "government crumbles" does not mean that the governmental bureacracy (e.g. schools, police, hospitals, etc.) is functioning any differently than it did before -- the current state of the Iraqi government is a bit like that of the U.S. government just after a new President has taken office and before he has appointed any staff or cabinet officers to carry on business.

There is, of course, a civil war going on in Iraq. Indeed, it has been going on for years, and has intensified in the last year or so, but that development isn't much different today than it was a week ago. Indeed, July was a relatively quiet month in terms of violence, as it has been every year since the U.S. occupation began (damn hard to go fight a civil war when its 117 degrees and there's no running water in Baghdad).