Los Angeles Times
In a sermon rich with bloody imagery and religious struggle, an influential Shiite Muslim cleric Friday condemned Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri Maliki's trip to Washington this week as a betrayal of Islam and a humiliation to his people at the hands of U.S. and Israeli aggressors.
Sheik Aws Khafaji intertwined the bloodshed in Iraq and Lebanon, calling it a design by Christians and Jews to defeat the Muslim world. He criticized Maliki's speech before the U.S. Congress and asked: "What forced you to eat with the occupiers? Is that your reward? You know more than anybody else that the car bombings, terrorism, explosions and bloodletting in Iraq are under the protection of Zionist-American plans."
Shia resistance to American troops is growing, according to US military leaders.
AFP
Bomb blasts echoed around Baghdad as sectarian death squads pursued their bloody work and the US military warned that it was facing stiffer opposition in formerly cooperative Shiite areas.
The US troops' most deadly foe remains Sunni insurgents -- four marines were killed in the mainly Sunni province of Anbar Thursday -- but the coalition is now drawn increasingly into clashes with powerful Shiite militias.
This trend is all the more ominous given that US commanders have decided to put around 4,000 additional troops into the mainly-Shiite capital to try to halt a surge in murderous bomb and gun attacks by rival sectarian gangs.
The US military's target in Baghdad includes the Shia death squads led by Iraqi government Interior Dept run by Badr Corps, and increasingly supported by Sadr's Mahdi army. But the Bush Administration insists it's not a civil war.
Newsweek
By most benchmarks, as one well-briefed Western analyst in Baghdad tells me, Iraq slipped into civil war "a long time ago." Some observers insist that the scope of the violence hasn't reached critical levels yet. U.S. and military officials in Baghdad admit that "tit-for-tat killings" are occurring, but on a limited scale. But what is "limited" about an estimated 6,000 civilians killed in May and June alone, according to a recent United Nations report on Iraq's violence? Or that some 27,000 Iraqi families had registered for relocation since February, according to reports from the Ministry of Displacement and Migration?
Bodies have been piling up at the Baghdad morgue at a clip altogether in line with an escalating civil war: 1,068 in January of this year; 1,294 in March; 1,595 in June. Altogether, the U.N report suggests that as many as 14,000 civilians have died in Iraq since the beginning of 2006. The vast majority of those deaths have been the result of "insurgent, militia and terrorist attacks ... with an increasing sectarian connotation." As a point of comparison, in the first years of Lebanon's civil war, when 1,000 dead per month made headlines, most people believed the conflict would be resolved quickly. But two years later, at the end of 1976, 35,000 people had died and everyone recognized that civil war was in full swing.
Politicians have artfully dodged the civil war question with fanciful language, calling it "sectarian conflict" or "civil strife." One senior Iraqi official went so far as to say "the language isn't important." Isn't it? The evasiveness calls to mind the politically correct characterization of the Balkan civil war as a "war of aggression." Or, more ominously, the shameful refusal on the part of the U.N. and the Western powers to recognize the Rwandan genocide for what it was. Only after the Hutus slaughtered 800,000 Tutsis with machetes did it become politically acceptable to begin using the term genocide. Civil wars don't just start in one day.
To be sure, it would be wrong to say that all of Iraq is at war. The Kurdish north is, at least for the moment, quiet and relatively stable, a world apart from the chaos of Baghdad. Similarly, much of the south is spared the ethnic hatreds and tensions of Baghdad. The Iraqi Army even took full control of one of the southern provinces recently, a fanfare of celebration for the Shia majority that lives there.
But for months, Sunni families have been fleeing the militia-dominated death squads in the nine Shia provinces of the south, heading north to Baghdad or other friendlier areas, leaving homes and friends behind them. And in the Sunni western desert, Shia are hated even more than the Americans. They are seen as purveyors of an Iranian agenda and accomplices in the despised American occupation. These facts lead to a simple conclusion: where there is even the slightest potential for sectarian conflict in Iraq these days, war on the very fabric of Iraqi civilization erupts. MORE
Some Republicans are been speaking out with courage about the Bush disaster.
WaPo
Sen. Chuck Hagel (R-Neb.) offered a sharp critique of U.S. Mideast policy yesterday, saying the United States must engage Syria and Iran and warning that a close alliance with Israel must not come at the expense of relations with the Arab and Muslim world.
Hagel, an iconoclastic Republican who has been considering a presidential bid in 2008, said lasting peace in the Middle East and security for Israel will come only from a regional settlement of the Israeli-Palestinian dispute, a process he suggested has been neglected by the United States in recent years. "Look at where we are in the Middle East with no process," the senator said in an address at the Brookings Institution. "Crisis diplomacy is no substitute for sustained, day-to-day engagement."
Hagel, a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee who has been critical of U.S. policy toward Iraq, also spoke soberly about the challenges ahead in that country, where he said there was "little good news." "America is bogged down in Iraq, and this is limiting our diplomatic and military options," he said. "The longer America remains in Iraq in its current capacity, the deeper the damage to our force structure, particularly the U.S. Army."
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