No less than 100 people are being killed, daily, in the violence gripping Iraq. Some are already describing what is happening as a civil war having started.
So, what does the US Secretary of Defence, Donald Rumsfeld, say at a press conference at The Pentagon?:
"Q. Is the country [Iraq] closer to a civil war?
SEC. RUMSFELD: Oh, I don't know. You know, I thought about that last night, and just musing over the words, the phrase, and what constitutes it. If you think of our Civil War, this is really very different. If you think of civil wars in other countries, this is really quite different. There is -- there is a good deal of violence in Baghdad and two or three other provinces, and yet in 14 other provinces there's very little violence or numbers of incidents. So it's a -- it's a highly concentrated thing. It clearly is being stimulated by people who would like to have what could be characterized as a civil war and win it, but I'm not going to be the one to decide if, when or at all.
As Andrew Sullivan in his blog The Daily Dish says:
"His detachment from his own responsibility is breathtaking. The glibness with which he describes the mass slaughter of innocents in a country whose security he is responsible for is astonishing."
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