Is It Civil War Yet?

Here at Road to the Middle Class we have said: Of course there is civil war in Iraq. There are parties contending for power, parties that mobilized for war after the collapse of the Saddam regime. What else are you going to call it?

But Ralph Peters in The New York Post says no. You want civil war, he writes, try this definition:

I'd define it as a broad internal conflict between at least two contending governments, each of which has the overt support of a substantial portion of the population and each of which fields organized (if not always professional) military forces.

Indeed, the strategy of the terrorists in Iraq is to provoke a general civil war in which the Iraqis are mobilized into general conflict their entho-religious parties: Shia, Sunni, and Kurd.

Clearly, general civil war hasn’t happened, not yet. But it might, and the parties have been building militias just in case.

Meanwhile there is a great civil conflict in Iraq, and our western media isn’t doing anything to help, as White House reporter Helen Thomas this week seemed determined to prove.

The MSM and the Democrats need to be careful here. The president says, as he did in response to Helen Thomas’s question on Monday asking him why he went to war in Iraq when “Every reason given, publicly at least, has turned out not to be true.”

I'm never going to forget the vow I made to the American people that we will do everything in our power to protect our people.

You can tell that he invited Helen Thomas to make her question so that he could wrap himself in the flag as the protector of the American people.

Liberals like to sneer about the president wrapping himself in the flag. They are wrong. The president’s job is first and foremost to protect the American people from enemies foreign and domestic. All the other stuff, the pensions, the rights, the programs, the promises, all that is mere bagatelle.

So when the president says that his entire effort is to protect the American people, you’d better be sure of your facts before you call him a liar. That is why Bush carefully, and politely makes sure to call Helen Thomas on her accusation.

I think your premise -- in all due respect to your question and to you as a lifelong journalist -- is that, you know, I didn’t want war. To assume I wanted war is just -- is just flat wrong, Helen, in all due respect --

All that stuff about “due respect” and “lifelong journalist” is gentlemenly politeness, packaging around the basic message: You are flat wrong.

The problem is that our news media and our educated elite just don’t get it. Not on the war, not on the economy, not on the social issues, not on the war on terror, and certainly not on civil war in Iraq.