	Generational Dynamics
	Forecasting America's Destiny ... and the World's

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Generational Dynamics Web Log for 28-Feb-06
I just heard on CNN International: "The threat of civil war in Iraq is over."

Web Log - February, 2006

I just heard on CNN International: "The threat of civil war in Iraq is over."

Surprise! Surprise! The press corps was 100% wrong, and I was right.

I really have to chuckle at this. There was NEVER any chance of a civil war in Iraq, for reasons that I explained in detail last week.

All that existed were the fantasies and wet dreams of a press corps so incredibly anti-American that they've lost any shred of objectivity, and have little professional integrity remaining.

You don't have to be an expert in Generational Dynamics to see that Iraq is not heading for a civil war. The easiest way to see that is to compare the situation in Iraq with the situation in Palestine:

In Iraq we were seeing large rallies and demonstrations, sometimes attended by tens of thousands of Iraqis, including both Sunnis and Shiites. In Palestine, you never anymore see any large demonstrations that include both Palestinians and Jews. The mixed rallies in Iraq are reminiscent of the anti-racial demonstrations in 1960s America, attended by both whites and blacks.

In Iraq we're not seeing any signs whatsoever of fault-line hatreds between Sunnis and Shiites. I have not heard of a single Sunni clerics calling for the murder of Shiites, or vice-versa. Not a single one. Not a single militia is seeking to wage war with any other militia. In Palestine, you have large numbers of people committed to the destruction of Israel.

Arabs and Palestinians are in a "generational crisis" period, and are headed for a major regional war, as I've explained many times. That's why you're seeing the hatred between Palestinians and Jews continue to grow on almost a daily basis.

In order for a civil war to occur, you have to a palpable hatred between the warring groups. You need some emotion such as was carried by the phrase "Cut down the tall trees" in Rwanda in 1994 -- when this phrase was used as a signal by Hutu leaders to kill the Tutsi ethnic minority.

Or here's the description by Amy Chua, in her book, World on Fire, about the civil war in the Balkans in the early 1990s: "In the Serbian concentration camps of the early 1990s, the women prisoners were raped over and over, many times a day, often with broken bottles, often together with their daughters. The men, if they were lucky, were beaten to death as their Serbian guards sang national anthems; if they were not so fortunate, they were castrated or, at gunpoint, forced to castrate their fellow prisoners, sometimes with their own teeth. In all, thousands were tortured and executed."

That's the kind of emotion we'd have to see to conclude that a civil war is coming. That's what's building in Palestine, but there's nothing like that going on at all in Iraq. What violence there is remaining in Iraq is mostly directed against buildings (mosques). Where people are being killed, it's appears to be by the same insurgency that's been operating for months. That's how I could be sure that there would be no civil war in Iraq.

The press corps, the pundits, the analysts could all have seen the same thing. It's not rocket science. But they're all bound up in anti-Americanism, and lie awake at night having erotic dreams of the worst possible outcome for America.

The people in the Baby Boomer generation are extremely arrogant and narcissistic, as I've said many times before. But within the Baby Boomer generation, the group that's most arrogant and narcissistic of all is the journalists. We've seen this recently with their attitude about the Danish cartoon controversy.

This civil war hysteria was really the limit. These guys never once stopped to question their own assumptions and biases. They wanted to embarass America with an Iraqi civil war, and they overwhelmingly slanted the news in that direction. It's a truly shameful display, and it proves that journalists are also wrong when they say that they're professionally able to separate their political opinions from their reporting. There's no separation at all.

From the point of view of Generational Dynamics, what's going on today in Iraq is almost a textbook case of an Awakening era, like America in the 1960s, with the enfant terrible Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr playing the role of the kids and America and the Iraqi government playing the role of the parents. Here's what I wrote two years ago:

But it's always a tumultuous time because it features a major generational class between kids of college age and their parents.

In 1960s America, we saw the assassination of President Kennedy, of Martin Luther King, and of Robert F. Kennedy. We saw massive racial demonstrations in Washington D.C., and we saw racial riots and demonstrations throughout the country. We saw bombings in Washington, Chicago and elsewhere. We saw calls for civil war and insurrection that were supported by the media and polls -- but which turned out to be no more than rhetoric. And we saw two presidents, President Johnson and President Nixon, forced from office because they became so unpopular as a result of those protests.

Those same things are happening in Iraq today.

Our policymakers should take the trouble to understand this equivalence, because if we understand what happened in our own country 40 years ago, then we have a much better chance at understanding what's happening in Iraq today, and what we should do about it.

What I wrote two years ago is just as true today. We're going to go through hell in Iraq, until the world war starts and we're forced to refocus our troops elsewhere. But there will be no Iraqi civil war, even though the press corps will keep hoping for one. (28-Feb-06) Permanent Link
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Generational Dynamics Web Log for 28-Feb-06 I just heard on CNN International: "The threat of civil war in Iraq is over."

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Generational Dynamics Web Log for 28-Feb-06
I just heard on CNN International: "The threat of civil war in Iraq is over."