The battle lines of a full-scale civil war in Iraq have been drawn in Baghdad.
Highway 60 has become one of the bloodiest fronts in the war between Sunni and Shia. Known to its frightened inhabitants as the "street of death", the road in the south-east of the capital is a symbol of the sectarian violence that is pushing the country ever closer to the abyss.
A nondescript suburban street containing half a dozen schools, the local hospital and a children's nursery, it has become the dividing line between the Sunnis and Shia, who once lived side by side yet now face each other across a mile-long strip of no man's land.
Members of the once mixed community have been forced to move their homes to what are, in effect, two sectarian enclaves.
But hey, at least according to The Decider, they've got "free press" and "free religion". What else could someone who is about to murder or get murdered by his neighbor want?
Now, I am not as sanguine as some have been about what referring to the non-stop carnage as civil war would actually mean or change on the ground. I think the reluctance to do so is because it's a tacit acknowledgement of failure, of course, but there's also more than mere semantics. It seems pretty clear that the situation is intractable, and there's not much we can do about any of it, especially since much of the violence appears to be committed by some of the very same police and army forces we need to "stand up" so that we can "stand down" (Christ, I am beyond sick of that useless phrase).
So I would reasonably infer that once the "civil war" nomenclature is applied, and it will be soon, Chimpco will take that as their cue to start controlled redeployment. (This is, of course, assuming that Israel doesn't end up goading Iran into attacking in Iraq, in which case all bets are off. Prepare for $5.00 per gallon gasoline.)
In other name game news, America's favorite political amphibian flexed his gills for Father Tim, feebly attempting to burnish his foreign policy cred for his upcoming ill-fated tilt at the preznitential windmill.
I mean, this is absolutely a question of the survival of Israel, but it’s also a question of what is really a world war. Look what you’ve been covering: North Korea firing missiles. We say there’ll be consequences, there are none. The North Koreans fire seven missiles on our Fourth of July; bombs going off in Mumbai, India; a war in Afghanistan with sanctuaries in Pakistan. As I said a minute ago, the, the Iran/Syria/Hamas/Hezbollah alliance. A war in Iraq funded largely from Saudi Arabia and supplied largely from Syria and Iran. The British home secretary saying that there are 20 terrorist groups with 1200 terrorists in Britain. Seven people in Miami videotaped pledging allegiance to al-Qaeda, and 18 people in Canada being picked up with twice the explosives that were used in Oklahoma City, with an explicit threat to bomb the Canadian parliament, and saying they’d like to behead the Canadian prime minister. And finally, in New York City, reports that in three different countries people were plotting to destroy the tunnels of New York.
I mean, we, we are in the early stages of what I would describe as the third world war, and frankly, our bureaucracies aren’t responding fast enough, we don’t have the right attitude about this, and this is the 58th year of the war to destroy Israel.
There's a lot here that Newt has inadvertently conflated in his frantic attempt to posture as some great military historian. First, all these terror cells he refers to in Miami, Toronto, and England have nothing to do with one another. There is not a concerted effort here, it's more of the open-source style of systems sabotage John Robb has been talking about for so long, not to mention that the Miami and Toronto cells appear to be inept groups of garden-variety idiots. That doesn't mean there aren't real threats out there, it's just that it's useless to lump them all into some common entity that we can formulate common policy and strategy against.
Second, if you really want to get serious about the state-funded terror Gingrich prattles on about, then consider which country is conspicuous by its very absence from his litany of rogue states. Where did North Korea get its nuclear technology? Pakistan. Where did Iran get its nuclear technology? Pakistan. And where did Libya almost get its nuclear program started, until Qaddafi got talked out of his tree for the time being? That's right, our good buddies in Pakistan. Funny how they're always absent from the equation. Funny how we found a way to "work with" them, but we're just itching to get our thrill-kill on for the Iranians and the North Koreans, as if they won't respond to soft-power diplomacy as well. Pakistan's military and intel are stuffed to the fucking rafters with hard-line Islamic extremists; if we can find a way to deal with them, we can find a way to deal with the mullahs. And unless we really want the deaths of tens of thousands of civilians on our hands, we better find a way. Sounding the WW3 alarm is not helping, not one damned bit.
So of course The Pantload is all up in that shit.
I thought Newt Gingrich did a very good job making the case that we're at the dawn of World War Three on Meet the Press today. My only caveat is that I think those who argue this is World War Four (Norman Podhoretz, James Woolsey et al) have a better argument. According to this view, the Cold War was WWIII. I like this formulation because A) it recognizes what a monumental effort the Cold War really was and B) it provides for more creative thinking about the predicament we're in now.
It's actually very uncreative thinking, very clichéd thinking, but The Pantload's patented Cliffs Notes way of analyzing issues that are way past his intellectual reach are his stock in trade. As a legacy pundit (don't recall who coined that one but it fits Goldberg like a XXXL pair of Spiderman underoos), it's all he can do to lard his weekly idée fixe with like-minded quotes from people who are only slightly smarter than he.
No word yet on how we'll pay for this Third World War, or who's going to fight it, but you can bet the Serious Thinkamators will insist on keeping their tax cuts. After all, what's the point of being a one-percenter if you can't gobble your cake and still have it?
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