What does "civil war" look like?

In March, 80% of the population thought that civil war in Iraq was either likely or somewhat likely, compared to 16% who thought it unlikely.

Allison Caldwell of ABC news reports "The rise in sectarian violence has sparked fresh fears of a descent into civil war"

One guy reported in the article has it right.

ALLAN BEHM: I think since the death of al-Zarqawi, there's been no single leadership focus, so we see now the splintering of groups, each operating, I think, on their own agendas without much in the way of unified direction.

William Lind of Antiwar.com has it right.

Observers continue to ask, "Will Iraq descend into civil war?" The answer is that civil war is already underway in Iraq. Most people do not see it, because it is not following the Sunni/Shi'ite/Kurd fault lines on which we have been lead to focus. As is usually the case in war, we are the victims not of deception but of self-deception.

Later in that same article:

The resulting civil war may still have Sunni vs. Shi'ite aspects; in fact, it is almost certain to include that fault line. But there will be many other fault lines as well, some within the Shi'ite and Sunni communities, some cutting across them. At the physical level, this works to the "government's" advantage, in that its relative power increases. But at the moral level, virtually all the other factions have greater legitimacy than the "government." And just as the strategic level trumps the tactical, so the moral level trumps the physical. That is one of John Boyd's more important insights into the nature of war.

NOTE: THIS WAS WRITTEN IN JULY 2004!!!

CBS News discussed ethnic cleansing (c'mon folks, time to call it what it is) in Septeber of 2005.

CBS News was shown a pamphlet by a young man too afraid to reveal his face. It's an order for all Shiites to leave his neighborhood, or be killed — given to him in broad daylight by masked terrorists. The man said if he did not leave, he will die.

January of 2006 brings another from Alternet

Friday's election results make it nearly impossible to stop the country from descending into full-blown civil war.

Only the blogosphere seems willing to admit that civil war is already there, and US presence is simply making it worse.

Yet Bush and his congressional thugs refuse to admit that this is going on.

"We'll stand down when they stand up" just isn't believable anymore. Put on top of this that militia members have infiltrated the police and armed forces, so they will be of no help once US troops leave.

It sounds a bit too much like Nixon's quote, as highlighted here:

President George W. Bush likes to say that "as Iraqi forces stand up, American forces will stand down." Given that track record, U.S. forces may end up being in Iraq far longer than anyone hoped, least of all, the troops themselves. In fact, if we are to learn anything from history, President Richard Nixon used to say the same about the war in Southeast Asia: "As South Vietnamese forces become stronger the rate of American withdrawal can become greater."

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Arianna Huffington, posting from Aspen says this.

In between panels, I ran into Colin Powell and asked him if we are ever going to get out of Iraq. "We are," he told me, "but we're not going to leave behind anything we like because we are in the middle of a civil war." Powell and Jack Murtha both talking about civil war in Iraq -- shouldn't that be headline news?

Yet, alas, the media still denies that a civil war exists there, cowing to the bully pulpit of the white house, afraid to be attacked like the New York Times by a rabid free speech hating white house.

UPI Analyst Claude Salhani has an excellent analysis and some outtakes from this article about a "better" Middle East, taking into account that the current borders were designed to carve up a post WWI empire.

It is time to admit to ourselves that we are doing more harm than good in Iraq and that bloodshed may be the only way to come to borders that are more acceptable to the people living inside of them.

I don't want to sound like I am encouraging a civil war, it only seems to me that we are delaying, rather than prohibiting, a full out war between the sects.