Gilliard: Civil War in Iraq by July 4
Steve Gilliard of Daily Kos is moving up the timeline yet again for when he thinks the situation in Iraq will have reached the stage that can be justifiably characterized as “civil war”: Delusions. Following up on a USA Today article (Official: US not read for Iraq chaos), he discusses the difficulties we’re likely to have in rounding up peacekeeping troops from the other members of our much-ballyhooed “coalition”, given the extremely negative attitude toward our war and occupation in those countries.
To recap: On April 10, Gilliard specifically did not predict civil war, but laid out the signs that would let us know one was coming: How Iraq could devolve into civil war. On June 6, he said the situation would indeed be a civil war “well before September”: No end in sight. And then today, this latest prediction of a civil war by July 4.
I’m not sure that the sky is really falling. Rumsfeld would no doubt dismiss this with some weirdly sarcastic mixed metaphor. But we’ve got an easy test: if the violence in Iraq settles down noticeably over the next three weeks, Rumsfeld wins a point. If it ramps up, with the size of the engagements increasing, point to Gilliard. If it stays more or less the same… I guess we get to keep arguing about what it all means.
