Mike Yon: "Civil War Rages In Iraq"

"OF WORDS"

By Michael Yon

We can just as easily use Texas an example because its population also closely matches with Iraq. Iraq has a population estimated at about 26 million, while Texas is around 23 million. More recent lowball estimates of the deaths from the war in Iraq for the first three years of the current war, including civilians, Iraqis and Coalitions forces, would be about 35,000. That’s roughly a thousand people killed per month—and that rate has been sharply increasing.

If a thousand people were killed by violence in Texas every month, and if the carnage was sustained over a period of three years, and was getting worse, and if Texans were destroying their own oil wells and pipelines, and killing as many police and National Guard as possible, we likely would not call that “civil unrest.” We likely could mentally factor in and factor back out that some of the killing would be due to criminal activity. But if we were losing a thousand Texans’ per month for three years, and its leaders and institutions where powerless to stop it, likely most of us would agree that Texas would then be in a state of civil war, even if there were few specifically definable sides wearing specific color uniforms whose leaders espouse specific goals.

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