Terrorists' Appointment in Samarra: The Civil War in Iraq

Whenever critics of the Bush administration's Iraq policy call for immediate withdrawal of U.S. and coalition forces, or even setting a timetable for withdrawal, they inevitably are met with dire warnings that doing so would touch off a civil war by inflaming tensions among Iraq's deep-seated ethnic, religious and regional rivalries.

Well, guess what? That argument no longer has any validity because Iraq is already embroiled in a civil war that has plunged the country into chaos that is far worse than anything experienced under Saddam Hussein's brutal rule.

The latest evidence came Wednesday when one of the most famous Shiite shrines, a golden-domed mosque in the city of Samarra that contains the tombs of two revered Shiite imams, was destroyed by a large explosion. It was the third major attack against Shiite targets this week, and while no group claimed responsibility, Iraqi government officials blamed Sunni extremist groups that were trying "to pull Iraq toward civil war."

If that's so, the terrorist groups don't have to pull very hard. Nobody in the White House or Pentagon, or in the American political and military command in Iraq, has yet stated the obvious, but Iraq is already deep into a vicious civil war between he majority Shiites and minority Sunnis, and has been for months. And this is without any major response from the independence-minded Kurds, who will fight to the death to control their oil-rich region of northern Iraq.

Meanwhile, casualty rates continue to rise among U.S. and coalition forces caught between the warring factions while trying to root out Iraqi insurgents and foreign jihadists led by the diabolical Jordanian, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi as the cost of the nearly three-year-old war approaches the $500 billion wasted in Vietnam. Nearly 2,300 American military personnel have been killed since the April, 2003 invasion of Iraq, and some 16,000 injured.

The attack on the famous Shiite mosque in Samarra, 60 miles north of Baghdad, touched off reprisals by Shiites as at least five Sunni mosques in Baghdad and two in the southern city of Basrah were attacked. Even as Iraq's most revered Shiite cleric, the aging Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, appeared on state-run television in the holy city of Najaf to condemn the attack in Samarra and call for restraint, Iraqi soldiers were deployed to Sunni neighborhoods in Baghdad to prevent further sectarian violence. Meanwhile, large protests erupted in Shiite areas across the country, with many of the protesters shouting anti-American, anti-Israel slogans.

The terrorists' appointment in Samarra came on the heels of another deadly car bomb explosion on Tuesday as two dozen people were killed and nearly 30 wounded at a public market in a Shiite neighborhood in Baghdad, and dozens more in other violence in other cities.

U.S. Ambassador to Iraq Zalmay Khalilzad on Monday bluntly warned Ibrahim al-Jaafari, the prime minister of Iraq's Shiite-dominated fledgling government, that the U.S. does not want to see the hundreds of billions of dollars it has invested in Iraq go to support sectarianism in its new government, as did British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw in a meeting with al-Jaafari in Baghdad Tuesday. But al-Jaafari angrily dismissed Khalilzad's warning, saying, "We do not need anybody to remind us, thank you."

If anybody still believes that civil war isn't already a fact of life in Iraq, the events of the past few days should certainly disabuse them of that misguided notion.