Quote:
|
Originally Posted by dksuddeth
by civil war, I did mean that iraqi's are killing iraqi's. sunni vs. shia. it's not 'countrywide' at this point, very sporadic, but its happening. could get bigger, might not. hard to say.
|
My point is simply that the situation is not Sunnis killing Shia: it is a small minority of violent Sunnis killing everyone else, including Christians, Jews, Americans, non-violent Sunnis, Shia, etc. Although the background is obviously competely different, I see this as more akin to the Detroit race riots than to any sort of civil war. A small, small segment of the population is attacking everyone else. As has become apparent, the differences I am stressing are the size and the focus of the terrorist insurgent Sunnis. In my view, they are getting less numerous and have always been small enough to not be considered a rival faction. Secondly, their political objectives (focus) are not clear: they want to topple the government, but what then? Even if they succeed in prompting an actual civil war, they still have little chance of coming to power because they are far less numerous than other factions.
__________________
The peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error. ~John Stuart Mill, On Liberty
|