The Daily Background

Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s logic has is just straight up stupid. He recently said that the situation in Iraq is “not a classic civil war at this stage… [it] isn’t like our Civil War.”

Well by that logic, the Rwandan Genocide of 1994 which resulted in the deaths of between 800,000 and 1 million Africans (see Wikipedia entry) wasn’t a real genocide because it didn’t look like the Holocaust. Or that because Danny DeVito isn’t technically a midget means he isn’t short. Utterly ridiculous logic.

Wikipedia defines civil war similarly to Princeton University:

A civil war is a war in which the competing parties are segments of the same country or empire. Civil war is usually a high intensity stage in an unresolved political struggle for national control of state power. As in any war, the conflict may be over other matters such as religion, ethnicity, or distribution of wealth.

Okay, competing parties: Sunnis and Shites- check. In the same country: Iraq- check. High intensity: an average of more than 100 Iraqis died every day from violence in May (no complete figures since then) and it’s gone up since then- check.

Seems to be a textbook civil war to me. Sunnis fighting Shiites and vice versa in the same country at a high intensity.

Filed under: Iraq Related, Z-TDB Blog