The Violence in Iraq Continues Unabated

Devastating:

Shiite militiamen doused six Sunni Arabs with kerosene and burned them alive as Iraqi soldiers stood by, and killed 19 other Sunnis in attacks on their mosques Friday…

The Baghdad attacks appeared to have been a reaction to the deaths in Sadr City on Thursday, when Sunnis unleashed bombs and mortars that killed 215 people and wounded 257 in the deadliest assault since the U.S.-led invasion.

That’s a civil war. I don’t know how the administration and its brain-dead supporters can continue to argue what’s happening in Iraq is anything but. They are completely delusional. Just look at this asinine response from the White House:

"We condemn such acts of senseless violence that are clearly aimed at undermining the Iraqi people's hopes for a peaceful and stable Iraq," said White House spokesman Jeanie Mamo.

Okay, first of all, they need to stop talking about “the Iraqi people” as if the Shiite and Sunni militia members aren’t Iraqis. Some of them may not be, but most of them are. Such a misstatement of reality helps facilitate the administration’s oft-cited flypaper theory to define “the Iraqi people” in contradistinction to militias, thereby subtly reinforcing the claim that terrorists are pouring into Iraq from the outside, as opposed to being created within Iraq’s borders by a variety of pressures, not least of which being our occupying presence. It’s an obscenely mendacious habit of Team Bush to frame nationals who do their will as “the X people”—when Bush gives a speech on the Federal Marriage Amendment, he says “the American people” want marriage to be between a man and woman, as if the LGBT community and its allies aren’t actually “American people.” The same thing’s going on here. Some Iraqi people certainly do have hopes for a peaceful and stable nation. Some clearly have hopes to exploit the chaotic morass we recreated to fight a centuries-old sectarian war. And some just want us the hell out of there and think that using bombs is the best way to accomplish that goal. They’re all Iraqi people—not just the ones who aren’t making our little nation-building endeavor not quite as easy as was foolishly predicted.

Secondly, this constant reference to “senseless violence” is illustrative of a deeply immature reluctance to speak about this war in a grown-up way. The violence is not senseless; it does indeed have a rationale and a purpose—which, of course, Team Bush plainly knows, since they inevitably follow up their accusations of senselessness by substituting the only explanation for the violence acceptable to them. The violence is “aimed at undermining the Iraqi people’s hopes for a peaceful and stable Iraq.” Any other explanation is intolerable to them (as it might begin to suggest a catastrophic policy failure), and is therefore not to be seriously examined.

It is absolutely stunning—stunning—that at this point Bush would still rather pretend that everything hasn’t gone desperately, irrevocably wrong, than show the merest glimmer of interest in engaging reality and beginning, at long last, to figure out how to start making things right—or if that’s even possible at this point. (Probably not.)