Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki still insists there's no civil war, and none looming in the future, either. From AP:
BAGHDAD, Iraq - A wave of bomb attacks and shootings swept Iraq Sunday, killing dozens of people despite a massive security operation in the capital and appeals from Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki for an end to sectarian fighting.
[...]
Al-Maliki insisted that his government was making progress in combatting attacks by insurgents and sectarian clashes between Shiites and Sunnis.
"We're not in a civil war. Iraq will never be in a civil war," he said through an interpreter on CNN's "Late Edition." "The violence is in decrease and our security ability is increasing."
Asked about U.S. allegations that Iran is supporting Iraqi groups involved in sectarian violence, al-Maliki said the reports were being investigated. He said Iraqi authorities were in contact with Iran in order to determine the veracity of the information "and to prevent this interference."
[...]
Across Iraq, Sunday's attacks left more than 50 people dead.
A group of assailants in three cars raked an open-air night market with gunfire, killing at least 12 people and wounding 25 others, police said.
The gunmen fired indiscriminately at throngs of people at the main market of Khalis, a mostly Shiite town 50 miles north of Baghdad, Diyala provincial police said. Earlier in the day, another six people were killed and 14 wounded when a bomb exploded on the outskirts of the town.
[...]
In downtown Baghdad, a bomb in a minibus exploded outside the Palestine Hotel, killing nine people and wounding 16, while a car bomb outside the offices of a government-run newspaper left three dead and at least 29 wounded, police and witnesses said.
Two back-to-back suicide car bombings in the northern city of Kirkuk killed nine people and wounded 22, hours after another suicide car bomb killed one person and wounded 16.
In Basra, Iraq's second largest city, 340 miles southeast of Baghdad, a motorcycle bomb at a night market killed four people and wounded 15, the governor's office said.
Drive-by shootings also killed two people in Mosul, 225 miles northwest of Baghdad; one in Numaniyah, a town near Kut, 100 miles southeast of the capital; and another three -- believed to be the bodyguards of a member of parliament -- in Dujail, 50 miles north of the capital, police in both cities said.
In Mahmoudiya, about 20 miles south of Baghdad, police found the bodies of eight people in various parts of the city, Capt. Rasheed Al-Samerayi of Mahmoudiyah police said. All had been handcuffed and blindfolded, he said.
They do have some original ideas. Bus-bomb, car-bomb, motorcycle bomb. Seems anything will do, so long as it kills. And the random 'handcuffed and blindfolded' bodies that are found daily must be the handiwork of those who had neither the automobiles, nor the explosives. Just good old fashioned choppers, the kind used by big mo.
Civil war ! Nah. All in a day's work for allah's soldiers.
Other than the bombs, and if they had them they would use them, it sounds almost as bad as the random killings that occur daily in our major cities in the turf-wars of gangs and dope dealing.
I have not heard the crys of dems/liberals of any civil war or bad planning done here or we have lost the war for the security of our own towns.
Some perpective is called for by those cut and runnners.
From MR NEAL BOORTZ"
WHY THE DEMOCRATS ARE SITTING THIS ONE OUT
It should be clear that the Democrat Party simply does not want to be engaged in the war against Islamic fascism. The Democrat Party is clearly becoming the Democrat-Appeasement Party. Good for the Islamic murderers. Bad for us.
Why, though, do the Democrats find it so terribly difficult -- almost impossible -- to even so much as admit that we are actually in a hot, shooting war with Islamic fascism? They simply view this as something that can be settled if we just sit down, be nice, and talk a lot.
Noodle it out. It's all about power. Political power. Regaining power and then retaining it.
Democrats know that the voting public views the Republicans as more likely to act to defend our country when we are under threat. The trick, then, is to make sure that the voters don't feel we're under a threat. Democrats know that if the voters come to understand that there is a grave threat to the security of the American people -- a threat, for instance, from Iran's nuclear program, and from Islamic radicals around the world -- then these voters are not going to be likely to vote for a party that they view as weak on defending America.
Democrats like John Kerry are trying to convince the people that Islamic terrorism is no more than a simple law enforcement problem. Find them. Arrest them. Try them. Jail them. Oh, and by the way, make sure they get their full plate of Constitutional rights in the process ... even though they most certainly aren't entitled to them.
Listen to these appeasers! "The war in Iraq is wrong." "We need to talk to Iran." "We need to make Israel stop killing all those innocent civilians."
Listen, friends. There is no "war in Iraq." There is no "War in Afghanistan." There's the Iraq front and the Afghan front in the world-wide war against Islamic fascism. Instinctively, you know this.
That's what scares the Democrat-Appeasement party so much