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The U.N. and the Government of Iraq recently published the results of recent studies on how many civilians are being killed daily in Iraq and the number is astonishing: at least 100!

United Nations officials said they had based their figures on tallies provided by two Iraqi agencies: the Ministry of Health, which tracks violent deaths recorded at hospitals around the country; and Baghdad's central morgue, where unidentified bodies are delivered, a vast majority of which met violent deaths.

In addition:

UN officials also said that the number of violent deaths had been steadily increasing since at least last summer. In the first six months of this year, the civilian death toll jumped more than 77 percent, from 1,778 in January to 3,149 in June, the organization said. [According to the report, 1,778 civilians were killed in January, 2,165 in February, 2,378 in March, 2,284 in April, 2,669 in May and 3,149 in June.]

3,000 civilians killed per month. What a disaster, with no end in sight, and no plan to end the killing...

Is this a civil war? Nicholas Sambanis, an associate professor of political science at Yale, co-author of “Making War and Building Peace: United Nations Peace Operations, clearly thinks so:

Civil wars are defined as armed conflicts between the government of a sovereign state and domestic political groups mounting effective resistance in relatively continuous fighting that causes high numbers of deaths. This broad definition does not always distinguish civil wars from other forms of political violence, so we often use somewhat arbitrary criteria, like different thresholds of annual deaths, to sort out cases. Depending on the criteria used, there have been about 100 to 150 civil wars since 1945. Iraq is clearly one of them.

Read on...

“I just want you to know that, when we talk about war, we're really talking about peace.” Remember when Bush said that?

So in Bush's right-wing-nut, Orwellian world, your post is actually about peace. Ugh.

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