"At least it's a SECTARIAN civil war in Iraq."

[trof]

Retired general Bernard Trainor just said that on MTP.
He was generally critical of the Bush administration for post war preparedness and operations.

I don't agree that just because the combatants are both Muslim that it's a sectarian civil war.
Here is the difference between Sunni and Shi'ite:

"When the Prophet Mohammed died in 632, his top followers elected Abu Bakr to become "caliph", or successor. Most Muslims supported him to lead the Islamic faith. They are the Sunnis.
However, Mohammed's relative (?) and son-in-law, Ali Ibn Abu Talib, argued that caliphs should be blood relatives of the prophet. This group took their name from the Arabic phrase "Shia'tu Ali", meaning "party of Ali, and became the Shi'ias.

In 656, this split led to civil war between the factions and the outnumbered Shi'ias fled to the frontiers of the empire into what is now Iraq.
Thus, in Iraq the Shi'ias are the majority and the Sunnis the minority, just the reverse of the rest of the Islamic world.

When the Ottoman Turks (Sunnis) conquered the area in the 1500s they put Sunnis in control of the area now known as Iraq, even though most people in the area were Shi'ites.
Following WW I, the British, under a mandate from the League of Nations, installed Faisal I (a member of the Sunni royal family in what is now Saudi Arabia) as parliamentary king. This greatly angered the Shi'ites AND the kurds, Iraq's largest minority.
Today about two thirds of Iraq's population is Shi'ite and about 20% is Sunni."

[barbaraann]

1. Well, I think a sectarian war is worse than a civil war.

It seems to me it would be more difficult to resolve religious differences than political differences.

[atommom]

2. Religious differences do seem to lead to the worst savagery

and destruction. It's very sad.

[Muddy Waters Guitar]

3. Yes-- Thirty Years' War

Based on duration, per capita casualties and economic ruin, it was the worst of Europe's wars, worse even than the two world wars put together. The German peasants had to deal with idiot greedy interlopers on one side or the other, both Protestants and Catholics, stupidly citing religious verses even though their real objectives were much more in line with old-fashioned greed and hunger for territory. This Christian sectarian civil war was a bloody mess and lasted for decades, and a conflagration in Iraq between Muslim sects could have similar effects.