Tony Snow, historian

The White House press sect'y lectures us on American history.

Q Tony, a couple of minutes ago, you said one of the goals in Iraq is to prevent civil war. Can you take a minute and give us the definition that the President is working with? Because he continues to say it's not at that state yet; lots of analysts do say it's at that state. What's the threshold that the administration is working with --

MR. SNOW: I think the general notion is a civil war is when you have people who use the American Civil War or other civil wars as an example, where people break up into clearly identifiable feuding sides clashing for supremacy within Iran.

Q And there's nothing on the ground that the President is looking at that he thinks is a prospect --

MR. SNOW: At this point, you do have a lot of different forces that are trying to put pressure on the government and trying to undermine it. But it's not clear that they are operating as a unified force. You don't have a clearly identifiable leader. And so in this particular case, no.

What you do have is a number of different groups -- you know, they've been described in some cases as rejectionists, in others as terrorists. In many cases, they are not groups that would naturally get along, either, but they severally and together pose a threat to the government.

Oh, I see. Then this is just an instance of a routine "sectarian dust-up," or maybe a block party gone bad?

BAGHDAD, Dec. 9 — Bands of armed Shiite militiamen stormed through a neighborhood in north-central Baghdad on Saturday, driving hundreds of Sunni Arabs from their homes in what a Sunni colonel in the Iraqi Army described as one of the most flagrant episodes of sectarian warfare yet unleashed in the capital.

The officer, Lt. Col. Abdullah Ramadan al-Jabouri, said that more than 100 Sunni families, many with very young children, had left the Hurriya neighborhood aboard a convoy of trucks and cars under cover of the nightly curfew. Government officials tried to urge the families to return by promising army protection, but could not persuade them.

[...]

The fighting began around noon, when militiamen began rampaging through the only mixed district in Hurriya, a mostly Shiite neighborhood, and killed at least three Sunni Arabs. One family was shot as they left their home, with a 20-year-old man killed and his mother and younger brother wounded, according to an account given by the man’s father, who was at work as a security guard elsewhere at the time. The man said the three were hit by automatic rifle fire as they finished loading possessions into their car and prepared to drive to a safer area.

Colonel Jabouri said that skirmishes set off by the militia attacks continued for about five hours, until sunset. Meanwhile, a large convoy of Sunni Arabs waited in their vehicles outside the fortified Muhaimin mosque, waiting to drive to neighboring Sunni districts while local leaders negotiated with militiamen for safe passage.

A Sunni cleric, Sayed Ahmed Muhammad, said the negotiations also involved appeals from top government officials, including Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, a Shiite, for the Sunni families to return to their homes in Hurriya under promise of Iraqi Army protection. But the cleric said the assurances failed to persuade the Sunnis, whom he described as the last of more than 4,000 Sunnis to flee the area under Shiite militia threats in recent months. The convoy set out after dark.

Colonel Jabouri, the Iraqi military commander in the area, said his troops had tried to help groups of Sunnis protect themselves and their homes. But the large number of Shiite militiamen involved — whom he identified as belonging to the Mahdi Army, the most powerful Shiite militia — made that impossible. He described the fighting as the worst eruption of sectarian skirmishing so far experienced by the Iraqi Sixth Division, which shares responsibility for security in Baghdad with American troops.

“As an Iraqi, I’m against sectarianism of any kind,” he said. “I’m against any group that that seeks to build barriers between people on the basis of their religion.”

The role of American troops in the turmoil was unclear. The Sunni cleric, Sayed Muhammad, said appeals for assistance from the First Cavalry Division, its headquarters about three miles southwest of Hurriya, had gone unanswered. But Colonel Jabouri said Iraqi commanders had told the Americans there was no need for their help. A First Cavalry Division spokesman said American advisers with Iraqi troops in Hurriya had reported only one instance of sectarian trouble, when Iraqi troops assisted a Shiite family under threat from Sunnis.

That account appeared to reflect the cyclical nature of the sectarian violence that has soared in Baghdad in recent months, and has led to thousands of families fleeing mixed Sunni-Shiite areas for the safety of neighborhoods in which their own sect dominates. Hurriya lies in an area of western Baghdad where there has been a surge of attacks on Sunnis living in Shiite-majority areas, and vice versa. Just south of Hurriya lies Amariya, a Sunni Arab stronghold where scores of Shiite families have been driven out by attacks or threats from armed Sunnis.

Sayed Muhammad described the aim of the Shiite attacks on Saturday as creating a Sunni-free corridor across northern Baghdad that would run from the Shula district on the city’s northwestern edge to Kadhimiya, a Shiite stronghold on the west bank of the Tigris river. The main area of Shiite strength in the capital lies on the east bank of the Tigris, principally in Sadr City, home to about 2.5 million Shiites, about 40 per cent of Baghdad’s population.

“It’s part of a much wider plan,” the cleric said. “What we’re experiencing here is the Shiite groundwork for a civil war.”

One of the striking features of the violence Saturday was that it occurred in an area that lies less than three miles northwest of the heavily guarded Green Zone compound that doubles as the seat of the Iraqi government and as an American command post. American diplomats and military commanders have been pressing the Maliki government to take urgent action to begin to curb all militias, and particularly the Mahdi Army, which is under the nominal control of a radical Shiite cleric, Moktada al-Sadr, who is an important political ally of Mr. Maliki.

No, this isn't reminiscent of the Civil War at all.

Several anti-slavery organizations in the North, most notably the New England Emigrant Aid Company, organized and funded several thousand settlers to move to Kansas and vote to make it a free state. These organizations helped to establish Free-State settlements in Topeka, Manhattan, and Lawrence. Abolitionist preacher Henry Ward Beecher collected funds to arm like-minded settlers with Sharps rifles, leading the precision rifles to become known as "Beecher's Bibles". By the summer of 1855, approximately 1,200 New Englanders had made the journey to the new territory, armed and ready to fight.

There was also organized immigration to Kansas from southern states, most notably Missouri, to secure the expansion of slavery. Proslavery settlements were established at Leavenworth and Atchison.

Rumors had spread through the South that 20,000 Northerners were descending on Kansas, and in November 1854, thousands of armed Southerners known as "Border Ruffians", mostly from Missouri, poured over the line to vote for a proslavery congressional delegate. Only half the ballots were cast by registered voters, and at one location, only 20 of over 600 voters were legal residents. The proslavery forces won the election. More significantly, the Border Ruffians repeated their actions on March 30, 1855, when the first territorial legislature was elected, swaying the vote again in favor of slavery. The proslavery territorial legislature convened in Pawnee on July 2, 1855, but after one week it adjourned to the Shawnee Mission on the Missouri border, where it began passing laws to institutionalize slavery in Kansas Territory. This was the touchstone for the commencement of open violence.

Ok, then I guess if the analogy is correct, we can't rightly refer to what's happening in Iraq as a "Civil War" for another five years. Six, tops.

Atrios is right. These people are not only unserious,

These are people with broken brains and souls.