Sectarian violence at Wuzzadem seems to be on the upswing. Whole areas of the comments section appear to be on the edge of igniting into an INTARWEB-WIDE conflafuggingration:
The fact that you list all that and have a “mission accomplished” banner image is funnier than you’ll ever know.
So Sparky, if sectarian forces killing each other in the same country isn’t a civil war what is it then?
Posted by: salvage | Nov 28, 2006 8:47:56 AM
Oh my God, you’re right! The irony of using the “Mission accomplished” banner (itself the subject of numerous “war time semantics” debates) completely escaped me until you pointed it out. Thanks for enlightening me.
As for the definition of a civil war, I think “sectarian forces killing each other in the same country” is a bit muddled, so maybe you can clarify for me – should the people fighting this “civil war” be from the same country? If so, that kinda screws the claims left has been making that Iraq is the number one tourist spot for ME jihadists looking to relax while they knock off a few Americans (and maybe a fellow Muslim/Arab civilian or two or three or twenty), doesn’t it?
If those non-Iraqis have now stopped pouring over the poorly guarded borders, and all the fighting is between Iraqis battling for control of the country, I missed Matt Lauer’s report. He is a leading expert on Iraq, right?
Anyway, I really hate to S-P-E-L-L things out for people, but I’ll make an exception in your case: What’s funny and/or pathetic is the media reporting that the media is changing the terminology it uses when reporting on the war. Get it? I didn’t think so, but thanks for playing.
Posted by: John from WuzzaDem | Nov 28, 2006 9:25:25 AM
We cannot turn our INTERTUBES over to the trolls, just as we cannot leave Iraq to the Sectarians and their Sectarian Violence. If you haven’t bopped a couple of trolls for John, well . . . they’re mostly different from the ones we’ve got here.
UPDATE: NYT Joins MSM Race to Civil War (Ace has the story)
More Civil War:
French police the target in urban guerrilla war
Stoned, beaten and insulted, their vehicles torched by crowds of hostile youths, French police say they face an urban guerrilla war when they enter the run-down neighborhoods that ring the major cities.
“Our role is to guarantee the safety of people and property but the great difficulty today is that police are having problems ensuring their own safety,” said Jerome Hanarte of the Alliance-Police Nationale union.
Bedside television interviews with officers hospitalized after beatings in “les banlieues,” or suburbs, support statistics showing a 6.7 percent jump in violent crime in the 12 months to August.
Fourteen officers are hurt every day in the line of duty, unions estimate, and law and order is sure to feature prominently in next year’s presidential election.
The head of the French crime statistics body told Reuters the rise in attacks on police was partly due to Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy’s 2002 decision to order police back into tough areas, to disrupt the black economy that fuels crime.
They’re two of the Left’s Ten Commandments:
There is no mission but The Mission, and you shall accomplish no other missions until you have accomplished The Mission.
Thou shalt never say “mission accomplished” until The Mission has been accomplished, even if the mission you claim to have accomplished is not The Mission (see previous).
Yeah, McGehee. You know, this Sectarian on Sectarian violence has to stop. If they’d stop and think about it, for a moment, they’ve got so much Sectarianism in common.
Doesn’t a civil war kind of screw up the last Lancet study?, well, depending on when the civil war started. Did Matt happen to mention?
I have no sympathy for those damned Sectarians. I’m a Methodist!
You’d think so, wouldn’t you, happyfeet? But let’s not be too hard on Matt. He just says what his teleprompter tells him to say.
You ain’t one o’ them High Church Methodists, I hope?
High? Methodists don’t do none o’ that incense stuff.
I know a Catholic couple with 5 kids who claim to
be “rhythm methodists”.
Thanks I’ll be here all week…don’t forget to tip your server and drive home safe!
I just know I can work in something about a rimshot here.
Think Andy Sullivan or Jeff Greenwald. It’ll come to you.
Could someone explain to me why Sectarian Violins are so bad?
Thanks in advance.
civil war
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Wikipedia has an article on:
Civil war
civil war
1. A type of war fought between members of a single nation or similar political entity.
Uh, the gallows humor seems a bit misplaced.
Hopefully, we are coming out of a period of
re-defining accepted notions not unlike this passage from ‘1984’
““To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed…†(Page 223)”
It is encouraging that there are some who still want to discuss the deformed family member tucked into a closet.
If “sectarian forces killing each other” is a civil war, then I guess the US is currently embroiled in about a hundred civil wars. Bloods vs. Crips, anyone? Hatfields and McCoys, for that matter.
Do these people ever stop for five seconds to think about the logical consequences of their assertions?
Christ, do you? Has there been anything analogous to the Education and Health Ministry attacks and kidnappings in the Crips/Bloods feud? Even close?
At what point does this conflict reach the fringe-wackjob threshold for civil war?
If it’s a civil war, then it isn’t our war, is it?
heet & semanticleo, why would the left be so keen on calling Iraq a civil war? I’m thinking maybe it helps them with their Vietnam metaphor? It is the left that is employing semantics for the purpose of diminishing support for the US presence. But Robert is right, it seems to me – can you explain how defining Iraq as a civil war can be based upon a logic that would not invalidate any future peacekeeping action anywhere by definition?
Much as Orwell posited a “perpetual war” used by political leaders to command the support of the populace, Semanticleo looks to define strife in the Middle East as a perpetual civil war in which US citizens can be pursuaded we have no strategic interest.
The reason for the push to define the war as a civil war is to justify the cut-n-run policy advocated by the left. Too bad the definition also should have prevented the US from joining WWI, WWII, Korea, Vietnam & must, in turn, prevent intervention in Dalfur & make illegal the actions in Serbia, Somalia & every major or minor military action in the last 60 years. It also now makes UN peace keepers nothing more than illegal militaristic participants, involving themselves where they have no reason to be. But given the left’s support of Saddam, Cuba, North Korea, China, the former Soviet Union & Germany leading up to US involvement, it is surprisingly consistent.
happyfeet,
That is quite the mindreading ability you have there, bucko. Why don’t you instead start answering my very simple questions above instead of going into full-shriek talkingpoint mode?
As for the rest – what basis do you have to assume there can be no peacekeeping actions in the middle of a “civil war”? In other words, it isn’t up to ME to tell YOU why we can conduct peacekeeping once the semantic cat is out of the bag. That crazy idea is your assumption, so make it. Why can’t we, oh wise one?
semanticleo proclaimed:
That sounds a bit… ironic coming from one such as yourself.
Ooo… the smacktalking continues. Until, of course, heet decides to run away for a couple more days.
The thing is that any day now, we’re going to be energy-independent, so the Middle East will no longer have strategic importance –
Well, except for that whole “convert, submit, or die,” thing, but I’m certain that now that actually talking with Iran has occurred to some at high levels, we can lay that little problem to rest. Because Daniel Pearl – the guy who sawed his head off with a dull sword on camera obviously thought he was a winger, right?
Oh, my country…
Teleprompter? Eeeverybody’s got an opinion. (Rim shot.)
Frankly, that what I hate about the news from Iraq–too much sects and violence. (Rim shot.)
Next time you need an expert opinion on American foreign policy, just ask yourself: What would Matt say? (Rim shot.)
Semantic: If you knew how to use a computer, you’d be dangerous. Incidentally, what kind of vodka are you drinking?
Incidentally, semanticleo, I looked all over page 223 of my copy of 1984 and your passage just… wasn’t there. (In plainest possible words, cite correctly or don’t cite, sir or madam; a bad cite only makes you sound ignorant.)
And all right, while I’m on that subject, “gallows” humor is precisely correctly placed when it is used in tragic situations. That’s why it’s called “gallows” humor.
But, Jamie. Nothing can make Smenatic sound ignorant.
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Can we please keep the computer skilz questioning to a minimum?
Some of us are a bit sensitive.
It’s a Civil War because everyone on the reactionary left just KNOWS that you can’t win a Civil War.
Unless you, like, actually win one.
Does the name Rob’t. E. Lee ring a bell?
U. S. Grant?
Helloooooo…….
tap tap tap
Is this thing on?
heet:
That’s from the UN itself, found here.
Clearly, peacekeeping operations are only appropriate post-conflict. How can defining civil wars down not find tension with the definition of peacekeeping? What basis do I have to assume there can be no peacekeeping actions in the middle of a “civil warâ€Â? That is not MY assumption – it’s the assumption of your UN pals.
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semantic? ya there?
[Google ad removed]
hey, is this thing on?
[help]
Since when did you care what the UN has to say about anything, especially Iraq?
I see what’s going on here. You guys don’t actually have any rationale for comparing Iraq with the Crips and Bloods feud. It is a stupid, shallow comparison but instead of actually backing up such idiocy, its easier to make inane semantic points or make up some shit about liberals wanting America to lose. Good luck with that.
Patrick,
Some people have lives outside of posting at PW.
I don’t really buy the Crips/Bloods feud comparison, either, heet, but on the other hand, they’ve exported their rackets and their violence all around the country. I would say that they’re certainly less ideologically driven, and less apt to kill unaffiliated civilians in hopes of provoking a civil war. On the other hand, to claim that the destabilization that they’ve managed to create is greater than it is is frankly dishonest (we’ve plenty of examples of their using our too-credulous media that way) and creates a false perception that aids them. I don’t think that it’s incorrect to say that there are many so-called liberals, of whom the late, unlamented monkyboy was one, who would rather have the US lose.
And you, not enough of same.
Did they even come close to attacking government agencies and taking government employees hostage? It’s still a stupid analogy. There has to be an incredible level of unchecked violence to allow this to happen. Twice.
If you really believe this, then I can’t help you. I think this is where debate (or whatever we have going on here) breaks down completely. I at least think you want what is best for America in your own twisted way. You, however, start with the assumption that your opponents want America to lose.
What the fuck is that shit? Since we are practicing amateur psychology, let me try. I think the warbloggers are so implicated the the policies that have brought Iraq to civil war, they will do anything to avoid confronting the failure of those policies. That means imagining enemies everywhere – the media, liberals, Europeans, the UN, whatever – to pin the blame on in a flurry of righteous anger and semantic bullshit.
I don’t think you read monkyboy very carefully, then, heet. What do you think of what was going on with oil-for-food? How do you feel about coddling regimes that insinuate that the holocaust is a fiction perpetrated in order to build international sympathy for Jews? What do you think of the international community’s silence over the fate of the kidnapped (not captured) Israeli soldiers?
How are non-Muslims treated in the countries where temples and churches are torched because people are upset over cartoons, some of which were not commissioned? What, on the other hand, do they demand from the Westerners whom they despise? How many UN sanctions ought there be before something is done? How widely is it reported that in the last two years some 7,000 al-Qaeda members have been put out of commission, one way or another?
Why is the Pope loudly decried for his speech in Regensburg, while Muslims in Western countries feel that it is all right to preach hatred and incitement to violence in the mosques that these countries have permitted them to build, and sometimes even subsidized?
Where is the outrage?
“How do you feel about coddling regimes”
Isn’t that what were doing with the current elected regime in Iraq?
Perhaps we should set one particular timetable.
Tell the Iraqi Gov’t that it has a set period of time during which they must remove the Sadrites
from the security forces or they face the loss of the considerable perks they enjoy, compliments of the American taxpayer.
. . . what’s the rest of that sentence, Dana?
Not that I disagree with the rest of your sentiment, mind you. It will involve significant slaughter, of course, but . . .
Is there a difference without a distinction? Other than that your question escapes me.
I like the idea, actually, of telling the Sunnis and Shiites to piss off, and we’ll remove to the north of the country, and help build a Kurdistan up there, where a significant chunk of the oil resources are, and see whether or not that causes the Sunnis and Shiites to rethink their differences a bit.
Have you noticed that Tehran will be hosting a conference on the Holocaust? Apparently, a bunch of imams will determine whether it happened or not, and if so, to what extent.
Well, France certainly qualifies as having a civil war under all those qualifications. Oh wait… they really are having one…
Dan,
I’m outraged by that stuff, sure. But what does that have to do with whether Iraq is in a civil war or not?
He’s outraged.
This is a social experiment.
Heet. What difference does it make whether the current killing in Iraq is described as a Civil War or not?
They’ve certainly done battle with the police, which IIRC is a government agency. Your point?
Secretarian violence? I dunno, mine’s never been violent, but interrupt her break with a rush job and she’ll get awfully shirty.
Maybe you’ve got something there: “Hey, you lazy little shitheel. Stop crawling around drooling on the oriental carpet. Stand up and walk, goddamit. And, while you’re at it, try using the bathroom next time instead of shitting in your pants. I’m fucking sick of cleaning up after you.
And go out and get a job.”
In fact, let’s just make them get rid of Islam all together by…oh, let’s call it Valentine’s Day. And if they don’t, we’ll just hand the place to Iran.
Sweet!
This is a second social experiment.
Semanticleo, Dan Collins was suggesting that by selectively quoting only the first part of his line which read in full, “coddling regimes that insinuate that the holocaust is a fiction perpetrated in order to build international sympathy for Jews?”
Can you answer that question? Or is it your contention that the current government in Iraq makes that insinuation?
Do you agree that the insurgency in Iraq is far too weak to defeat us directly militarily? Do you agree the only way they can win is by acts of terror and propoganda that demoralize the US forces, and more importantly the US populace, to the point we quit and withdrawal before the Iraqi government can stand on its own? Do you agree that fringes of the anti-war movement are attempting the same thing?
Point out to me which of these statements you disagree with and why.
Damn, B Moe, that was nicely put.
In a tactical sense, of course. Though I’d like to know just who constitutes the insurgency these days in your mind. We have several sectarian groups killing each other to gain power or just plain reprisal. Do you mean everyone who isn’t killing other people or did you have a particular group in mind?
The “only” way? Of course not… You are so focussed on the “stabbed in the back” defense that the failures of those ACTUALLY IN CHARGE are invisible.
First of all, I freely admit that manipulation of US media is an aspect of the situation. You have to ask yourself, though, how much of the violence over there is aimed at altering US policy? As far as I can tell, very little. Most of it is simply a means to eliminate an enemy, most always a fellow Iraqi.
Second of all, what do you mean by “win”? I’m not sure defeating the US militarily is their goal. It may be to repress enough enemies that they get their thugs elected to office. It might be monetary gain. Or pure religious fanaticism. Or even getting US support by killing the right bad guys.
Finally, US reluctance to carry out the war can also be attributed to awful planning and prosecution. You see, if you fuck something up badly enough, people will notice and tell you to stop. GWB and Rumsfeld fucked it up themselves. They didn’t send enough troops, they didn’t plan for post-Saddam, they didn’t include any neighbors, etc… Take your pick. I’m not an expert but it doesn’t take a genius to know when the words “utter chaos” apply even if you don’t know exactly which (in)actions brought you there.
There are more choices than just the malicious intent of unpatriotic liberals or a manipulated media. GWB managed to piss off most everyone, ya know, and they ain’t all brainwashed by the MSM. You’re just going to have to take my word on this one.
Along those lines, GWB COULD have carried out the war in a manner that is successful. He could have
1 been more open about intentions
2 not alienated a large portion of America with inflammatory rhetoric used purely for political gain (this I think is one of his biggest mistakes)
3 been more inclusive with his coalition
4 put people in charge who could win
I’m not saying these would have done it but my point is a good leader know how to lead. To get things done even with opposition by cajoling, persuading, lying occasionally, but generally by taking people someplace and making them think they wanted to go there on their own. Bush fucked that up and now his righteous apologists are dreaming up people to blame.
hmmm….
I think I can agree with this part:
Shit. He got hit with “inflammatory rhetoric used purely for political gain” as soon as he refused to concede Florida.
And squawking about how Iraq is being lost by everyone but the guys in charge makes you an expert?
So you got nothing, eh?
Which intentions do you think he was being covert with?
When did I say that? There have been obvious mistakes and misjudgements, hindsight and all that. The point I am trying to make is the reconstruction is being lost primarily by leftist fucktards who have been howling for three years that is already is lost.
Do you understand the difference between being and already is?
I highlighted the most obvious contradiction in your rambling spew, I just don’t give enough of a shit to address the whole mess.
Attention dumbass – leftist fucktards are not in charge of the Iraq war or the reconstruction. This is my entire point. Wake the fuck up.
Leftist fucktards have appointed themselves in charge of how the war is perceived. But they’re so busy furiously masturbating with the copies of Lakoff they keep hidden under the covers that they haven’t thought ahead to how the soldiers they claim to support will react when a media-annointed commander in chief tells them to make sacrifices. Credibility matters.
And just because the President is a Republican doesn’t mean that there aren’t leftist fucktards in protected civil service positions doing things like leaking sensitive information to the press to undermine the administration.
Wake the fuck up yourself, moron.
Um,
that line was aimed at heet, not ‘feet. I apologize for the confusion.
HOW is it being lost? is it because it’s taking longer than you think it should? too few casualties as compared to other conflicts? people keep pointing out that the ONLY way we lose is to give up before the job is done. most of the military people there would tell you that progress is being made, slowly.
In terms of getting any sort of answer to a question, I would have to say that the social experiments in respect of heet and semantic leo have been miserable failures.
On the other hand, having seen the intellectual rigour which they were able to bring to bear in the remarks they posted, I think I will regard the experiment as a success.
1 been more open about intentions
What? A house resolution wasn’t enough.
2 not alienated a large portion of America with inflammatory rhetoric used purely for political gain (this I think is one of his biggest mistakes)
Al Gore can do it , but the repubs can’t?
Besides it was Colin Powel and he was at the UN.
3 been more inclusive with his coalition
Ah. The invitations went out, but strangely enough most of Europe didn’t RSVP. Much like the didn’t do in Bosnia.
4 put people in charge who could win.
That’s just a stupid statement and doesn’t deserve to be taken seriously
Come to think of it, the other three aren’t any better.
But I’m glad you agree that leftists are fucktards. As you so quaintly put it.