A dangerous war makes a staggering shift

[cal04]

With signs of organized crime, attacks on businesses, war enters new phase
Fourteen shot at a trading company. At least 90 kidnapped at other businesses. Bodies dumped nightly, bound hand and foot, some tortured. A new brand of violence — a deadly mix of organized crime and sectarian murder — is tearing at Iraq.

Its origins are murky. But the savagery has turned March into a pivotal month in the three-year war — a month of gruesome news, mixed with some good. A sharp decline in American deaths appears to be the payoff for handing more duties to the Iraqi army, leaving U.S. forces less exposed to attack. At the same time, there has been the rise in the slayings of civilian Iraqis, the reasons for which are hard to find.

Not so many weeks ago, this was a conflict with straightforward, if brutal, terms. Sunni insurgents and al-Qaida terrorists used car bombs, roadside bombs, suicide bomb belts and sniper rifles to target U.S. troops, Iraqi soldiers, police and civilians — mainly Shiites, the newly ascendent majority after years of Saddam Hussein’s oppression.

Terrorism with different focus
Those groups still operate and still kill. But their war has been dwarfed by the shadowy and incipient terrorism stalking the capital of Baghdad and its adjoining provinces. Or perhaps — as some Iraq officials believe — the insurgents simply switched their targets, moving from American and Iraqi troops to targeting businesses and Iraqi civilians as a way to cause chaos or to fund their work.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/12070948/

[Minnesota Libra]

1. Anyone that doesn't call that sectarian civil war is crazy too nt

[PassingFair]

2. The *ssholes who spout the "news" think

that if they use the phrase "sectarian violence", we
won't know it's a CIVIL WAR.

I HATE the media.
I HATE this administration.
And I dislike like strongly
anyone who supports it.