Aohell

Immigration, Not Iraq

With all the talk about immigration of late, it's interesting to note that the disruption in the Baghdad morgue reporting is not making headlines.

It should be making headlines, because there are a number of refrigerated trailers in the parking lot of the Baghdad morgue to handle the amount of bodies coming into the morgue each day. The Iraqi government has suspended announcing the actual number handled in the morgue each day because of the recent spike in volume which, if it's anything like the volume in the first 8 days after the Samarra mosque bombing, was up over 100 per day, analagous to the actual civilian casualties during the shooting war back in 2003.

If it's gotten that bad, then the level of civilian casualties would point towards not an outbreak of criminal activity, not a breakdown in government authority, but an organizational approach to violence one typically associates with war. Given that the violence is mostly civilian vs. civilian, it would be classifiable as a civil war.

This isn't histrionics on my part. It's not hyperbole. It's looking at what the numbers were like when the US invaded in 2003 and what they were like before the Iraqi government pulled the plug on their reporting. They're similar. They indicate war is happening. "Civil war" is merely the type of war that's going on, since the violence is not entirely directed at government or occupation forces.

So as Americans debate over what sort of jobs Americans aren't willing to do, it's looking more and more like either the Bush administration will either need to accept defeat and get out of a collapsing Iraq, or gird up and send in a bunch more troops into combat. Combat's certainly a job rich Americans don't want to do, so goody for them there are enough poor Americans and willing immigrants to do it for them.

Regardless of troop levels and ferocity of occupation, however, I don't think the US troops will be any more effective than the UN Smurfs unless they pick a side in the conflict and start fighting its wars. Then they'll be much less effective.

Watch out.