[Sinner]

I will quote a a professor at a major research university, a registered Democrat, a liberal by some measures, but a radical conservative relative to the large majority of his colleagues.

http://engram-backtalk.blogspot.com/...zing-iraq.html

These foreign fighters are not "insurgents." Instead, they the al Qaeda terrorists who have been drawn to Iraq like flies. Al Qaeda uses precisely that method (suicide bombings), it is a terrorist organization (i.e., they indiscriminately target civilians), they have stated their intention to slaughter Shiites, they claim many of these spectacular bombings, and the U.S. military attributes almost all of them to al Qaeda. By contrast, there is not one shred of evidence that I have encountered to suggest that these mass-casualty suicide bombings are being carried out by Sunni Baathist insurgents as part of a civil war. Al Qaeda terrorists target Shiite civilians for indiscriminate slaughter because their whole plan to provoke civil war in Iraq, not because they are fighting in that civil war to defeat the Shiites. It's a good plan, not foreseen by anyone, and it has been working fairly well.

All of this brings me to the important point I'd like to re-emphasize today because of a new article that just came out in the prestigious Foreign Affairs magazine (which I'll get to shortly). What is critical to understand, and what even prominent thinkers cannot seem to assimilate, is that there is a distinction between two kinds of violence in Iraq:

1. Sectarian violence between Shiites and Sunnis as they seek to defeat each other (which can be reasonably construed as being part of a civil war)

2. The indiscriminate slaughter of Shiite civilians by al Qaeda suicide bombers as they seek to provoke Shiite-vs.-Sunni conflict (which cannot be reasonably construed as being part of a civil war)

As violence of the first kind has decreased of late (i.e., as the civil war has abated), violence of the second kind has increased significantly (i.e., efforts to re-ignite the civil war have ramped up). That's what the evidence shows, and those who are paying attention to the details know that. Those who aren't paying close attention, such as Harry Reid, just see confirmation that Iraq has descended into civil war. Yet Reid, who has never shown the slightest understanding of the role played by al Qaeda in Iraq, has the audacity to claim that Bush is in a state of denial.

Harry Reid fails to see what al Qaeda has been doing which is provoke a civil war and convince Americans the war is lost.