Iraq I: Civil War

Time magazine has a nifty symposium in which four experts of various backgrounds and political stripes discuss why civil war in Iraq is now not only imaginable, but possible. Scary stuff.

Meanwhile, the Washington Post weighs in with this awful news, which was published before another 75 deaths today in Baghdad alone:

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.

Former CIA operative Larry Johnson believes the civil war is already under way in a post at TPM Cafe headlined "The Nile in Iraq." His lead-in:

Whoops! I meant, "Denial in Iraq". The denial in question is why most of the US media and the Bush Administration persist in refusing to accept the reality of the civil war already well underway in Iraq? What do we need in order to be convinced? Guys wearing blue and butternut squaring off in an apple orchard in Gettysburg?