Iraqis reject civil war charge by Mubarak

NY Times:

Iraqi leaders joined together to denounce President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt today for publicly asserting that Iraq was already engulfed in civil war and that Iraqi Shiites were loyal to Iran.

Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari, a conservative Shiite, President Jalal Talabani, a Kurd, and Adnan Pachachi, a secular Sunni Arab who is the temporary speaker of the Iraqi Parliament, held a news conference to vigorously rebut Mr. Mubarak's assertions.

Mr. Mubarak, a Sunni Arab, had made the remarks in an interview on Saturday with Al Arabiya, a popular Middle Eastern television network.

"The comments have upset Iraqi people who come from different religious and ethnic backgrounds and have astonished and upset the Iraqi government," said Mr. Jaafari, who is fighting to keep his job.

"What also drew our astonishment was that he described the security problems in Iraq as civil war at a time when our people have proven that they are avoiding sectarian war," he added.

Mr. Talabani said: "The Shiites' patriotism cannot be questioned. They are pioneers in the national struggle."

The leading Shiite party in the country, the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, demanded that Mr. Mubarak apologize for his statement and threatened a boycott of the Egyptian government if he refused to do so.

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The story ignores the attemps in this country to label the conflict a civil war. It seems to be a sematic point all the way around. Certainly no one has has suggested a competing form of government other than al Qaeda's vague desire for a calphate. There is clearly no popular support for such a proposal. The enemy is very weak. It is incapable of massing it forces or controlling any real estate that the US for the goverment wants. Its main stregth is the support it gets from media organizations that give great publicity to its acts of impotence.