Reply #40: Here's an odd fact:

[dpibel]

People agree to be ruled by other factions all the time. Even in countries as primitive and debased as the United States, there is not civil war as the putative majority governs. Sometimes the lack of civil war is achieved by ruthless suppression (cf., voting rights in the US), but mostly it's because it's in everyone's best interest not to kill great numbers of your countrypeople.

You will notice that there are countries, unlike the US, where government involves power sharing amongst multiple parties (roughly the equivalent of factions). This is carried on without internecine bloodshed.

In fact, I (just my opinion) think you should take notice of the fact that there is no history of civil war in Iraq. None.

Once the British removed their benevolent boot from the Middle Eastern neck, Iraq did not erupt in wild sectarian warfare, even though the Brits, in finest colonial tradition, had drawn the borders to produce that very effect. Instead, the Iraqis settled down to making a country which became, right up until DaddyBush needed a testicular implant in the form of a war, the most advanced, westernized country in the effing Middle East.

Allow me to interrupt here to send a secret, coded message to people who might want to leap in here like jackals on fire to point out that I have committed the heresy of lionizing The Most Evil Man Ever To Live On The Face Of The Earth (TM)(this is not directed at the poster to whom I am responding, but specifically to the people identified, supra:

BITE ME

To put a slightly more nuanced face on it: Saying that, under Saddam Hussein, Iraq had near universal education, universal healthcare, burkhaless educated professional women, and good stuff like that does not constitute making a hero of The Most Evil Man Ever To Live On The Face Of The Earth (TM). It constitutes telling the truth. These things are not even controversial. So just clue up. Oh, did I mention bite me? Just making sure.

Thank you. We now return you to our regularly scheduled rant, already in progress.

You are aware, are you not, that Saddam Hussein had a cabinet which contained Shias? Did you know Tariq Aziz, Hussein's foreign minister, IIRC, is a Christian? Now I'll grant you that when The Most Evil Man Ever To Live On The Face Of The Earth (TM) told his cabinet and the parliament (They had one of those, too!! With different factions in it!!!) what to do, they damned well did it. But even The Most Evil Man Ever To Live On The Face Of The Earth (TM), near-omnipotent though he was, did not attend to every detail of civil and military life in Iraq. So the parliament, and all that kinda stuff actually functioned, and they did it with different factions working together.

Was it some happy, perfect democracy? Feck no. But it wasn't civil war, either.

The point of all of this is:

If you have some source other than the random synaptical firings of the American mass media and the regime of the Fierce Warrior Chieftain, and other than your own convictions, which will help me understand your certainty that civil war is the inevitable outcome, please post me a link, or get it to me some other way. I guarantee you I will read it.

Until such time, I'm going to go with history and with, for instance, the fact pointed out elsewhere on this thread that Sunnis and Shias intermarry and things like that which don't show hopeless enmity, and continue to believe that the certainty of civil war is a horseshit story, just like the rest of the crap the Fierce Warrior Chieftain, et al. spew, and that one of the reasons it works so well is that it allows people who otherwise think the invasion of Iraq was a ghastly thing, and that the occupation of Iraq is proceeding to hell in a fast handbasket, to maintain that the US must stay there, to protect those poor people from their mutual savage bloodlust.