With continuing great reporting, Michael Yon provides a travelogue of Thailand and the unreported war there, and Dubai. Oh, and he says that Iraq is in a civil war.

And here's a very long, but worthwhile essay on Iran by Mark Steyn.

The impression that I get from him, though, is that he considers Iraq to have been in a civil war for 40 years.

That turns it into somewhat of a matter of semantics, because while it acknowledges the (mostly one-sided) carnage of the past, the connotations of the words "civil war" are more in line with armies and organized militias duking it out in the open. Iraq's "civil war" for the last few decades has been anything but similar to our own, and will continue to be about as similar.

There's also the fact that there are not 2 sides, there are 20, with 3 ethnic factions, and plenty of people willing to cross the lines.

Yes. I was probably too nuanced, but I'm not of the school that "civil war" = "disaster" in Iraq. It was almost inevitable at some level, but it's not the end of the policy. It may be necessary phase in order to find our way through.

Rand

You should read a book called "Gods Graves & Scholars" which is the story of Archeology but has some incredible insight on how Iraq was in the mid 1840's. It was in civil war there with the Turks pitting the Shites against the Sunni against the Kurds then.

Read the story of the one eyed Pasha of Mosul for one of the weirdest stories you ever want to read.

Dennis

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