Saturday, January 29, 2005
WAR PREDICTED
Ali, a Friends of Democracy correspondent in Missan province, has his say on anti-election hollerers:
Those who holler in satellite stations and in the media about the future war that will burn Iraq are only actors in a vile, mischievous plot that will never succeed in destroying the Iraqi liberation project. The elections experience is the greatest experience Iraq will go through in its modern history. There is no substitute for it.
The Sydney Morning Herald’s Paul McGeough has been hollering about a future war for nearly two years. Apparently it can be caused by anything: invasion, occupation, Saddam’s removal, US withdrawal, elections ...
March 27, 2003:
Such an uprising has the potential to explode into a civil war between the Shiite and Kurdish majority ethnic groups and Saddam’s minority Sunnis, which many analysts fear could erupt before the coalition can impose law and order on Iraq.
April 15, 2003:
As happened in Yugoslavia after the death of the dictator Tito, would the country descend into a nightmare of civil war?
November 19, 2003:
Bush’s plans for a quick getaway ahead of next year’s US presidential election may set the scene for civil war in post-Saddam Iraq.
March 3, 2004:
The organised nature of last night’s attacks heightened fears of Iraq descending into a religious civil war ...
March 4, 2004:
The sadness, and the real threat that the same schism is being manipulated dangerously close to civil war in Iraq, comes from a hopeless layering of history’s violence and enmity.
March 10, 2004:
The Shiite leadership cast doubt on the document’s viability, immediately diminishing hopes that Iraq’s parallel politics - the Americans and their predominantly exile-run administration on one hand, and the sheer weight of Shiite numbers over Sunnis and Kurds on the other - might be steered away from descent into civil war.
March 13, 2004:
The fraught nature of that contest, which seems to edge steadily towards civil war ...
March 20, 2004:
The violence that might yet reduce the country to civil war ...
March 22, 2004:
It might be a civil war that gives birth to the new Iraq - not Bush’s liberation.
April 9, 2004:
The former UN weapons inspection chief Hans Blix told a French publication: “The country is on the verge of civil war today.”
April 10, 2004:
In the March 2 attacks, non-Shiite hands were assumed to be at work - an attempt to turn Iraq’s Shiite majority against the Sunni and Kurdish minorities, trying to provoke the much-feared Iraqi civil war.
May 15, 2004:
The fear now is that the real American success in Iraq has been the creation of the perfect environment for a protracted guerilla war which, at any time, could become a civil war.
June 26, 2004:
The only brake on the very real risk of civil war is the Iraqis’ abiding knowledge of their own brutal history.
June 28, 2004:
Shiite leaders in Baghdad are pressuring the Shiite tribes to give the new interim government an opportunity to resolve the crisis, warning them that to begin a tribal war would start the civil war they believe many Sunnis want.
September 11, 2004:
Iraq is showing all the signs of descent into an ugly civil war.
January 21, 2005:
Many voters will resort to religious and tribal edicts, decrees and urgings on how they should vote, thereby locking in Iraq’s sectarian divide and perhaps setting the scene for the full-blown civil war that some observers now fear is inevitable.
January 29, 2005:
Hanging over Iraq will be the threat of civil war.
UPDATE. It continues ...
January 30, 2005:
The leaders of the world are urging 15 million Iraqis to stare down guns and bombs today to vote in a fraught election that promises a democratic future - or a descent into civil war.