None dare call it....

Florence King, in the May 22 issue of National Review, dares speak the word that other conservatives dare not apply to Iraq.

Iraq "might be approaching" a civil war. It "could be spiraling into" a civil war. "If it were" a civil war. "It could turn into" a civil war. "It may be an undeclared" civil war. On and on it went: "on the brink of" a civil war, a civil war "is imminent.. over the horizon... threatening." There was even a "quasi-civil war", and, influenced no doubt by endless cancer-awareness spots, someone described a "pre-civil war" and predicted that "it could metastasize" into the real thing....

Conspiracy theorists on both sides of the political spectrum are no doubt in ecstasy over this festival of temporizing. Oliver Stone could get two movies out of it: 1) The liberal media want to start a civil war in Iraq while our troops are there so they will be killed in it, 2) A great big fat civil war is already in progress but the conservative media are under orders from the White House to play down the fiasco.

It has nothing to do with conspiracy. It's psychological projection, a head game we play on ourselves when we attribute our own situation to somebody else. WE are afraid of having a civil war, so we convince ourselves that Iraq is NOT having one.