A War by Any Other Name

Would still be called a war. So why are we not calling the conflict in Iraq for what it is - a civil war.

Grisly attacks and other sectarian violence unleashed by last week's bombing of a Shiite Muslim shrine have killed more than 1,300 Iraqis, making the past few days the deadliest of the war outside of major U.S. offensives, according to Baghdad's main morgue. The toll was more than three times higher than the figure previously reported by the U.S. military and the news media.

Hundreds of unclaimed dead lay at the morgue at midday Monday -- blood-caked men who had been shot, knifed, garroted or apparently suffocated by the plastic bags still over their heads. Many of the bodies were sprawled with their hands still bound -- and many of them had wound up at the morgue after what their families said was their abduction by the Mahdi Army, the Shiite militia of cleric Moqtada al-Sadr.

At the outset of the war this was everyone's worst case scenario - one that the Bush administration refused to acknowledge. Over the course of the war it became more and more inevitable. Finally we have arrived at the sad conclusion to this pathetic and disgusting "war" we waged. Iraq has descended into civil war, and civil wars are the bloodiest and fiercest of all wars. There is no one who bears more blame for this outcome than Bush. The buck stops with him this time, whether he likes it or not. This was not nation building, this was nation wrecking. Both for Iraq and for the U.S.