Insurgency

One of the themes I tried to explore a little in Lex Talionis is civil strife and out-and-out civil war. (The line between “revolution” and “civil war” is thin, murky, and often non-existent. A “civil war” ends up, much of the time, being a “revolution” that didn’t succeed right away.) Some of the reason for this was, admittedly, in reaction to not only some of the civil strife we’ve already seen on the streets of American cities (and out in the boonies, as well, with the Cliven Bundy bunch), but also some of the calls I’ve seen on the blogosphere and social media, on both sides of the political divide, for “revolution” or “let’s get the civil war over with already.”

Iraq Isn’t Exactly Over

While the media and many news sites cover the violence in Mali and Syria, it bears mentioning that there are still al-Qaeda and other fundamentalist groups operating within Iraq itself. Violence increased with the withdrawal of US troops last year, and the al-Qaeda involvement in the Syrian civil war has highlighted the fact that the organization we fought for almost nine years is far from dead. On March 11, a suicide bomber in Dibis, northwest of Kirkuk, killed three people and wounded 165, mostly school children at a nearby girls’ school. On the 7th, two gunmen and an Iraqi policeman were killed in a firefight in Ramadi. A third gunman, suspected to be al-Qaeda, was arrested. The three had planted an IED on the road to Anbar University, and had two more in their possession. Read more: http://sofrep.com/18137/iraq-isnt-exactly-over/#ixzz2NRCZzich