Civil war

The much touted "surge" that was dreamed up by John McCain and pushed so eagerly by George Bush, Joe Lieberman and most Republicans (against the advice of many generals) first saw a large INCREASE in violence in Iraq as ethnic clensing of neighborhoods in Bagdhad and elsewhere ran its course. Then there was a lull in violence, as formerly mixed Shia/Sunni neighborhoods became sharply segregated. But Bush, McCain and Lieberman claimed that the surge was working.

This month should put an end to that claim. As civil war broke out again, violence skyrocketed. From BBC news:

The monthly figure of people killed in Iraq rose by 50% in March compared with the previous month, according to official government counts.

A total of 1,082 Iraqis, including 925 non-combatant civilians, were killed, up from 721 in February...

March also saw an increase in bombings and intense fighting between Shia militiamen and government forces.

The number of deaths last month seems to confirm a trend of rising deaths due to violence.

More than 1,800 people were killed in August 2007. This declined to 540 in January 2008, but the figure has risen steadily since...

What happened was not that the surge worked. What happened was that al-Sadr has been calling the shots. When he declared a cease fire, violence went down.

My recent articles on the civil unrest in the African nation of Guinea (here and here) may yet be able to end happily.

Guinea has been seen as an island of stability in an area where bloody civil wars have been rampant, particularly in Liberia and Sierra Leone. The previously stable Ivory Coast had joined Liberia and Sierra Leone in being rent by civil war. Last week it looked like Guinea might follow suit. The worst of this would have been the way such civil wars quickly destabilize neighboring nations, and since Guinea's neighbors include nations that only recently have come to an uneasy peace, collapse of stability in Guinea could reignite problems in the whole region.

It seems though, at least for now, Guinea's stability has been restored. From BBC News:

Guinean unions have called off a general strike that has crippled the nation and led to deadly clashes, after a deal was reached with the government.

Nearly 60 people have died in protests since the strike was called on 10 January to demand government reforms.

President Lansana Conte agreed on Friday to cede some powers to a prime minister who would head the government.

Today's big stink is centered around a 4 minute piece on The Today Show, produced by Matt Lauer. Take a look :

In many of my presentations about blogging I have made the point that right now we are in the middle of a semantic warfare and that Google and blogs are the tools of semantic guerrilla warriors like me.

Here's the deal : Big Media was the tool of the powerful. When people talk about "Top-Down Politics" or hierarchical politics, it really doesn't start in Washington DC. Top-Down politics starts in New York City addresses like One Rockefeller Plaza and 229 West 43rd Street.

The magazines, TV shows and advertisments produced over at Madison Avenue, 6th Avenue (or Avenue of the Americas) and 10th and 11th Avenues have only one purpose : To influence "the demographics". It isn't a coincidence that politicos and advertisers use the same term to describe "the people" who end up shopping with their votes and voting with their wallets. The delusion is that Power in the United States is purveyed only by those who have control over what "the demographics" read, listen, wear, eat, like.

If you control desire/information/knowledge, the maxim used to go, then you control Power. So how are we to understand Matt Lauer's move?

Howard Kurtz on the linguistic missile :

I'm still working on the part where NBC gets more power if the conflict is viewed as a civil war. Because the network would be seen as galvanizing support for a pullout? All because of the use of the C-word? Is American support for the war so shaky that a single network's phraseology can cause that support to crumble?

[...]

I have no problem in using the phrase. But I don't think every news outlet needs to have an edict from on high.

I continue to believe that the day-to-day coverage of the carnage in Iraq is more important in terms of swaying public opinion than the label that the MSM chooses to slap on the conflict. Did most people think this wasn't a civil war before Lauer et al made the switch? I don't think so.

The attack on the mosques and the burnings that followed, took place in plain sight of an Iraqi army post. Yet the soldiers did nothing. That claim came not from Sunni groups, but Captain Jamil Hussein of the Iraqi police, underlining the bitter divisions within this society.

The perpetrators were said to be members of the Mehdi Army, led by the radical Shia cleric Muqtada al-Sadr whose main powerbase, Sadr City, was blasted apart. As well as killing 18 people and injuring 24 others, four mosques were burnt in the attack at Hurriya, where Sunni and Shia have lived together in comparative amity before the "liberation" by the US and Britain.

Ethnic cleansing of the area had started in the summer when the Mehdi Army had started taking over property and most of the Sunni residents had fled. Capt Hussein said the gunmen had attacked and burnt the mosques and continued burning other buildings until US troops arrived.

And here I'm complaining that my turkey was a bit salty.

Bush's idea of staying the course is insane on almost all levels. Stay the course on a stagnant economy? Why? Stay the course on global warming? Stupid and a missed economic opportunity! Stay the course on al-Qaeda? Bush STILL doesn't seem to care about catching bin Laden, the man who actually attacked America. Stay the course on Iraq? The course in Iraq is a spiral of violence that is beyond Civil War. Civil War implies two organized sides. Iraq is descending into the chaos of Afghanistan and Somalia, the exact kind of chaos that ENCOURAGES al-Qaeda and destablilizes the entire region.

The latest sign that he Iraq quagmire is an out of control mess that Bush has fumbled about every way he can is the fact that Iraqi academics are being killed at an enormous rate and those who survive are fleeing the nation as fast as they can.

From Salon.com:

Gunmen killed the Shiite dean of Baghdad University's school of administration and economics along with his wife and son on Thursday, four days after the murder of a prominent Sunni academic.

Jassim al-Asadi was driving with his family in the northern Baghdad neighborhood of Azamiyah when unidentified assailants pulled alongside and opened fire, police Lt. Ahmed Ibrahim said.

The shooting follows the killing on Monday of geologist Essam al-Rawi, head of the University Professor's Union and a senior member of the hardline Sunni Association of Muslim Scholars, which is believed to have links to the anti-Shiite insurgency raging against U.S. forces and their Iraqi allies.