Insurgent Attacks Kill 39 in Iraq

From the AP newswire:

Insurgents killed 39 people in a series of rapid-fire attacks Thursday, including three suicide car bombings within an hour and a drive-by shooting as a busy Baghdad market that ratcheted up the bloody campaign to undermine Iraq's government.

According to the AP story, Iraq's interior minister said that the Iraqi sweep in rooting out rebels in Baghdad had captured 700 suspected insurgents and killed 28 militants. While U.S. and Iraqi forces have stepped up operations, the insurgents have killed at least 814 people since Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari announced his cabinet five weeks ago.

A couple things strike me as interesting in this story. The first is that the Iraqi government--with the United States looking over its shoulder--has started to announce its successes in the insurgency by keeping score of the body count. This really harkens back to the good ole days of Vietnam where the U.S. government claimed it was winning the war by counting how many Viet Cong soldiers were killed. While the U.S. and South Vietnam government were counting VC bodies, the American troops were embarking on a flawed policy of pacification of South Vietnam--We have to destroy the village in order to save it! Pacification completely failed for it turned the rural villagers against brutality of the South Vietnamese Government while providing support for the VC, and North Vietnamese Army troops (Of course, the VC were no angels, since they would also force villages friendly to South Vietnam to aid and assist them). In the AP story on the Iraqi insurgent attacks, angry leaders of the Sunni Arab minority have complained that their community was being targeted in the government's crackdown on the terrorists. The Sunni Arab leaders have threatened to boycott the drafting of Iraq's new constitution. If the Sunni Arab leadership in Iraq does boycott the Iraqi constitution, there could possibly be an ethnic and religious civil war between minority Sunnis and majority Shiites--a war that would become especially rancid since the Sunni Arabs were in power during Saddam Hussein's rule and the Shiite Arabs were the ones oppressed. If civil war breaks out (and there's a good chance it already has), then the U.S. would back the Iraqi government under the Shiite Arab's control, thus forcing us into another civil war we can not win.

Vietnam was a civil war between the north and the south.