U.S.Troops in Iraq Tell McClatchy Reporter: Yes, It is a 'Civil War'

By: E&P Staff U.S. generals have had their say this week. Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld has spoken, so has Secretary of State Rice. Pundits, as usual, have weighed in, and weighed in again. Finally a reporter asked the real experts: U.S. troops in Iraq.

Tom Lasseter, longtime reporter for the Knight Ridder bureau in Baghad -- now run by McClatchy -- is heading back to the U.S. after many tours in Iraq, but before leaving, he took another embed this past week. His report for McClatchy papers today opened, "While American politicians and generals in Washington debate the possibility of civil war in Iraq, many U.S. officers and enlisted men who patrol Baghdad say it has already begun.

"Army troops in and around the capital interviewed in the last week cite a long list of evidence that the center of the nation is coming undone: Villages have been abandoned by Sunni and Shiite Muslims; Sunni insurgents have killed thousands of Shiites in car bombings and assassinations; Shiite militia death squads have tortured and killed hundreds, if not thousands, of Sunnis; and when night falls, neighborhoods become open battlegrounds."

After detailing the evidence -- as described by U.S. troops -- Lasseter observed, "The recent assertion by U.S. soldiers here that Iraq is in a civil war is a stunning indication that American efforts to bring peace and democracy to Iraq are failing, more than three years after the toppling of dictator Saddam Hussein's regime. "

Some Iraqi troops, too, share that assessment. "This is a civil war," a senior adviser to the commander of the Iraqi Army's 6th Division, which oversees much of Baghdad, told Lasseter.

"There's no plan - we are constantly reacting," said a senior American military official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. "I have absolutely no idea what we're going to do."

Staff Sgt. Wesley Ramon had a similar assessment. "It's to the point of being irreconcilable; you know, we've found a lot of bodies, entire villages have been cleared out, we get reports of entire markets being gunned down - and if that's not a marker of a civil war, I don't know what is," said Ramon, of San Antonio, Texas.