BAGHDAD, Iraq – While American politicians and generals in Washington debate the possibility of civil war in Iraq, U.S. officers and enlisted men who patrol Baghdad daily say it has already begun.

Army troops in and around Baghdad interviewed in the last week cite a long list of evidence that the center of the nation is coming undone: Villages have been abandoned by Sunni and Shiite Muslims; Sunni insurgents have killed thousands of Shiites in car bombings and assassinations; Shiite militia death squads have tortured and killed hundreds, if not thousands, of Sunnis; and when night falls, neighborhoods become open battlegrounds.

[San Jose Mercury News]

This is worse than even I ever envisioned it. Back in ’03, I pictured Vietnam; insurgents living among the rubble and the sand, pouring in from across Islamadom, confounding our misbegotten efforts at occupation, until we packed up and left, with nothing but our bloodied rhetoric. But I never imagined the natives would get so restless as to turn on each other, go cannibal. 

Now before I bring on Lincoln, can somebody please explain what the hell they’re fighting for? At least in the US civil war, we had a few really stupid reasons. But I hate your stupid guts on general principles is not a reason at all.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.

One more point: that nation was so conceived and so dedicated in the Oval Office and at the Pentagon. The seeds of this war may have been germinating for something like 1500 years, but they were planted, watered and fertilized in this new century by US.