Friday, February 24, 2006
The Next Big Thing
According to my blog-mate praktike at American Footprints, the "anti-American, pan-Arab daily 'Al-Quds Al-Arabi' (Arab Jerusalem), published in London" is now referring to the conflict in Iraq as a civil war. While he isn't sure this is the first time the newspaper has used this descriptive, he thinks it's accurate.
I guess that's fair and balanced. Charming, isn't it.
This is pretty much what the Lebanese civil war was like, only Iraq is perhaps less complicated for now.With that in mind, Media Matters caught a glimpse of how the GOP might attempt to spin the horror of the steadily intensifying civil war:
Fox News featured two onscreen captions during a segment on escalating violence in Iraq that read: "'Upside' To Civil War?" and "All-Out Civil War in Iraq: Could It Be a Good Thing?"Atrios admits that this angle surprised him. I don't know why. As far back as two years ago, Republican pundits like Charles Krauthammer were touting the prospect that the civil war in Iraq could be a "useful tool" for US interests (discussed here). Maybe Charles should have issued a spoiler alert before that column. Either way, if the tragic violence in Iraq continues to escalate, I expect this narrative to be all the rage. In the US that is. Something tells me Iraqis might, in their own self-centered way, fail to grasp the "upside" or the "goodness" of the ongoing carnage.
I guess that's fair and balanced. Charming, isn't it.
