The talk of civil war in Iraq is getting a LOT louder

Insurgents posing as police destroyed the golden dome of one of Iraq's holiest Shiite shrines Wednesday, setting off an unprecendented spasm of sectarian violence. Angry crowds thronged the streets, militiamen attacked Sunni mosques, and at least 19 people were killed.

the united states basically set in motion the very same dynamics that were unleashed in the balkans following the collapse of the communist/socialist/authoritarian/repressionist regimes that ruled there for so many years... when you keep a tight lid on a pressure cooker, when you keep a populace under strongarm control, even though it's through harsh and often brutal means, the apparatus of the country still tends to function... when the lid is taken off of that pressure cooker, all hell breaks loose, á la today's iraq...

The violence — many of the 90 attacks on Sunni mosques were carried out by Shiite militias — seemed to push Iraq closer to all-out civil war than at any point in the three years since the U.S.-led overthrow of Saddam Hussein.

AND, when you're the country that's taken the lid off and did so without any solid plan for dealing with the resulting chaos, it's a sorry scene indeed... colin powell's prescient statement, even though we were later to learn what a sorry coward he really is, still speaks volumes - the "pottery barn rule" of foreign policy: "you break it, you own it..."

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