Is It Civil War Yet?

Given that up to 50 people a day have been dying regularly in Iraq for God knows how long, even people like Riverbend have been cautious about saying that Civil War has broken out...

I’m reading, and hearing, about the possibility of civil war. The possibility. Yet I’m sitting here wondering if this is actually what civil war is like. Has it become a reality? Will we look back at this in one year, two years… ten… and say, “It began in February 2006…”?

Some say Civil War has been raging for months. Who knows? We cannot trust our governments to tell us the truth and we cannot trust the media either.

Now we learn that Iraqi casualty figures since the bombing on the Samarra mosque are three times higher than the media has been reporting.

The WaPo is blaming Moqtada al-Sadr's Mehdi Army for the carnage. Unfortunately, we cannot take the WaPo at their word either: they have their own internal civil war raging in the newsroom.

UPDATE: Well, what do you know? UPDATE: Many Challenge 'Wash Post' Claims on Death Toll in Iraq:

A Knight Ridder report from Baghdad late Tuesday stated that an American military official in Baghdad said U.S.-led coalition forces had been able to confirm only 220 such deaths since last Wednesday’s bombing.

It added that morgue officials said that the Post's 1300 figure "was nowhere close to what they'd seen. Many others, including Shiite and Sunni politicians alike, said they hadn't heard of anything approaching that number."

... Appearing on MSNBC this morning, Jonathan Finer, a Post reporter in Baghdad, said the 1300 figure was determined at the morgue by another reporter. The two bylines on the Post's piece are longtime Iraq correspondent Ellen Knickmeyer and Bassam Sebti. But it also lists as contributors special correspondents K.I. Ibrahim in Baghdad and Saad Sarhan in Najaf, staff writer Nelson Hernandez "and other Washington Post staff."

Seriously, the poor Iraqi people have suffered enough - let them be!

US OUT NOW!!!