roachboy

the category civil war has quickly become yet another ideological marker.

on the weekend, allawi gave a speech somewhere during which he said that iraq was in a civil war---almost immediately the administration started a campaign in the press to deny that it was.

so it has transpired that the evaluation of the situation in iraq has developed into another way of demarcating the line that seperates those who support the administration from those who do not.

the context of the 3rd anniversary of the iraq debacle, and the global protests against it that accompanied this sorry marker of the passage of time, was no doubt signficant in motivating the administration to begin pressing on this. what they are afraid of, it seems to me, is the term "civil war"--not because it cannot be applied to the situation, but rather because of the damage it can do to what credibility the war, and the administration that launched it, the administration imagines there to remain.


you could see this coming in the other thread on this topic, during the course of which it was evident that there was a problem with defining civil war---in particular, given restrictions on information flows from iraq (which have not gone away), was there any consensus on what, if any tipping point there was that would enable us, who are trapped within a sphere in information shaped by these controls, whether we like it or not, to make an informed conclusion for ourselves on the question.
whence the impetus to gather and post information that could function as data and to pose questions about how to interpret it.

which seems to me a better way to go about this than is a rehersal of the current ideological conflict over the term itself, which--once again--reduces a complex interpretive question to one of perception management and disposition maintenance.

i have to say that, i am not sure of exactly how to characterize the situation in iraq--which is far more complicated than it is made out to be in some posts above. it is obviously in a grey area that very easily could tip into civil war.
i dont know any better than anyone else whether it already has or not, in fact.

but it seems to me that informational threads do not fare so well in this forum---perhaps they are less fun in that they duplicate complexity rather than functioning to swat it away. this does not reflect so well on the potentials for real debate here, really because without information, debate is little more than partisan pissing matches, which are now, as they have been, tedious beyond measure.
maybe my comrades in 3-d are right in that this comes with the nature of messageboards themselves.
i am trying to figure this one out.
such motivation as i retain to play this game hinges on it.


another note, to link this back to the op:

bush gave a speech this morning in which he uttered a curious double negative, that cnn dutifully translated into a version of what he said by eliminating the double negative.

what he said was: "if i knew our strategy wasn't working, i wouldn't pull those kids out of there."
what cnn said he meant was: "if i knew the strategy wasn't working, i would pull those kids out of there."

the answer to the question posed in the op probably lay between these sentences somewhere.

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite