Reply #68: Of Course It is Civil War, Sir

[The Magistrate]

Those are pretty messy things, especially in a society where the tribe is still a leading social unit. Each tribe has a sheik, and there are hundreds throughout Iraq, both Shia and Sunni, and there are tribes that are mixed in religious allegiance. A sheik can rely on being obey, providing he is careful to seldom tell people to do something they do not want to do. Tribes have traditional allainces and enmities, relations and estrangements. Each has long calculated what is to its own local advantage as the guiding principle for its actions. The fact is that in some areas, many tribal leaders see co-operation with the U.S. as to the best interests of their tribe. It is also a fact that an increasing proportion of Sunni Arabs understand what many Shia Arabs intend for them when the withdrawl of the U.S. gives them full freedom of action. Only a very small proportion of the Sunni Arab populace is actively engaged in resistance to the U.S. occupation or in attacks on the Shia Arabs: it does not take any great number of people to carry out the sort of actions being pressed. The attitude of the broad mass of the Sunni Arab population to these fighters is closer to acquiesence than support: it is dangerous not to co-operate, in the sense of maintaining silence and looking the other way, and unthinkably dangerous to defy by co-operating with the occupier, and impossible to 'co-operate' with the Shia Arab militias who intend the killing off of Sunni Arabs.