March 20, 2006 - George Bush says it is not a Civil War.  Don Rumsfeld says it is not a Civil War.  Dick Cheney says it is not a Civil War.  Condoleezza Rice say it is not a Civil War.  Correspondent Ralph Peters writing for the New York Post tells us that Baghdad is chock full of happy children jumping up and down and cheering the passing Humvees.  Peters says he can’t find no Civil War. . Iyad Allawi says, “It is unfortunate that we are in civil war. We are losing each day as an average 50 to 60 people throughout the country, if not more. If this is not civil war, then God knows what civil war is.”

Who is this Iyad Allawi anyway?  Who is he to contradict the President of the United States?  What does he know?  First he is an Iraqi and that makes his opinions suspect.  Second he is putting his narrow perspective of conditions in his country up against the big picture of the conflict painted by America’s intelligence sources and her commanders on the ground.   And most importantly he is a man whose credibility in his own country is colored by the fact that he was Prime Minister of the Provisional Iraqi Government, installed by the United States and beholden to it for his position.  He lost that position as a result of the much heralded free and democratic Iraqi election.   Who then is he to declare that Iraq is in a civil war.

Today is the third anniversary of the of an American attack that was supposed to leave  Iraq decapitated as cruise missiles and bombers stuck the place where American Intelligence said that Saddam and his sons were located.  It is that same American intelligence that assured the reality based community that they knew where the Iraqi WMDs were located.  That same American Intelligence community that told us that an invasion of Iraq was a “cake walk”.  Now, three years later, the President say that he sees good progress in Iraq.  Not everyone shares his vision.

In his column today George Will broke with the President and wrote, “Iraq’s civil war – which looks more like Spain’s in the 1930s – began months ago.”    “Conditions in Iraq have worsened in the 94 days that have passed since Iraq’s elections in December. And there still is no Iraqi government that can govern.”, wrote the conservative pundit.  “By many measures conditions are worse than they were a year ago, when they were worse than they were the year before.” Lyndon Johnson is said to have remarked that America lost the war in Vietnam when it lost Walter Cronkite.  George Bush has lost George Will.

The Iraqi un-civil war has done one thing for the Bush Administration.  Reports of Iraqis killing Iraqis have pushed Coalition casualties off the front pages.   Not that the drumbeat of death has slowed much it is just drowned out by the Iraqi chaos.  The mounting Coalition death toll stands at 2519 in the 1096 days since the war was launched and the pace shows no sign of slackening.  Even as the number of Iraqis killed by their countrymen sky-rockets in the Civil War that George Will sees and George Bush doesn’t, the rate at which coalition soldiers are maimed and killed has not diminished.   Neither has the rate at which American dollars are spent to make things worse in Iraq than they were last year or the year before that.

George Will has made a career of being the erudite popular spokesman and apologist for the Republican Right.   Last month it was Bill Buckley who left the fold and declared the war in Iraq to be a failure.  One by one the Conservative elite is joining the reality based community once derided by an anonymous Cheney staffer.  Even the most loyal of the neo-con commentators is having difficulty passing this pig’s ear off as a silk purse.  Soon the cheerleading will be left to Fox News and the New York Post.   Already the smell of failure is in the air and already the word is whispered that we would have won in Iraq if only the politicians had the will to win.  To the unreasoning partisans of the Neo-Con orthodoxy the outcome is only a matter of will.  To a great extent it is a matter of Will – George Will.