And Now A Word From Reality Planet: Iraq's Civil War Spins out of US and Iraqi Government Control

Why can't the citizens of Wingnuttia see this?

However, I have to admit that I am just a little suspicious of exactly how this got so out-of-control. Me thinks that American and Brittish forces, perhaps special forces and corrupt contractors, had a big hand in fomenting this civil war.

I find it hard to believe that two sects of Muslims really hate each other more than they hate Bush and his crusading crackpots (I am not talking about the troops, in general, though there are some who are crackpots, for sure.)

The Muslim against Muslim thing just doesn't make any sense, if one has ever talked to ordinary citizens of, say, Egypt.

Merely living under Saddam's rule for all those many years would not have caused the sectarian strife we are now seeing.
The Shia cannot possibly believe that every Sunni was somehow involved in their oppression by Saddam. They must know that Saddam simply hated all opposition or dissent. It did not matter to him what Mosque someone attended. He murdered his own son-in-laws, for Pete's sake!

When it comes to crusaders, Muslims will always join each other in opposition to an invasion of their land.

What ordinary Americans do not seem to get, and therefore buy into a lot of administration hooey, is that unlike us, the people of the Arab lands, including Israel/Palestine, have exceedingly long memories. They have their history all around them, all day, every day. Their ancestors have lived and worked these lands for thousands of years; too many generations for us to count.

To most ordinary Arabs, land is wealth. It is very important to them.

But, you see, they have a living, racial, cultural memory of those other crusades. We know little about those crausades, nor do most of us care. That is ancient history, we think, and we had nothing to do with that anyhow. America did not even exist then, right?

Right. At least, it did not exist in it's present form. But, Christianity did. The Arab/Muslim world gets to hear just about everything the demented christian-right has to say about them and their prophet. It feeds right into Osama's Meme about the Great Satan and all the rest, about how the West is waging a war on Islam.

If anyone has betrayed our troops, it is the loud-mouhed whackos who help Osama convince the entire Arab/Muslim world that our soldiers are there as christian crusaders, not liberaters. to steal their wealth and occupy their lands.

Other than Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice and the egg-headed NeoCons, who certainly surpass all the rest, the crusading crackpots come in second in the race to betray our men and women in uniform.



DEBKAfile - Iraq�s Civil War Spins out of US and Iraqi Government Control: (Full article)

"Four essential factors underlie the deadly upsurge of Shiite-Sunni sectarian savagery in Baghdad this week:

1. No one, including US forces, has stepped in to halt the sectarian cleansing operation engulfing Baghdad in the last six months, the largest of its kind the world has seen in recent years.

Shiite fighters, many in the uniforms of the new Iraqi national army or Iraqi security forces, are battling Sunni gunmen, in defiance of their duties to - and the authority of � the Nouri al-Maliki government. This conflict is nothing but outright civil war.

First the two hostile camps fought one another for Baghdad suburbs. In early June, they clashed over the control of streets. Now they are dueling for single buildings that overlook strategic sections or installations in the capital. Some streets are consequently ruled half and half, and any Sunni or Shiite venturing into the wrong end of the street takes his life in his hands.

2. The most powerful military force in Baghdad today is the radical Shiite cleric Moqatada Sadr's Mehdi Army militia. With an estimated 15,000-20,000 men under arms, the Mehdi Army outnumbers the government's military and security forces' strength in the capital. "