Gary Monro’s blog

Nearly 200 people have been killed in Iraq in the last 24 hours as certain Sunnis declare war on the Shia community. It seems that Iraq is fracturing along the faultlines kept together by decades of tyranny.

Shortly after yesterday’s wave of explosions and shootings, a group linked to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, calling itself al-Qaeda in Iraq, claimed responsibility on an Islamist website and urged all Sunni Muslims to “wake up from your slumber” and join the fight.

The group claimed that the carnage came in response to a successful Iraqi and US joint military offensive against the rebel stronghold of Tal Afar, a staging post on the Syrian border used by foreign recruits, five days earlier.

The Times has learned that al-Zarqawi, considered to be Osama bin Laden’s lieutenant in Iraq, has united insurgent groups in Baghdad to target the Shia community with the aim of bringing civil war to Iraq as it prepares for a referendum on its constitution next month.

According to US military intelligence sources , al-Zarqawi, the man responsible for the bloodiest acts of terror in Iraq over the past two years, now commands thousands of fighters from various rival groups and is set to order further waves of bombings.

Al-Zarqawi promised war, without mercy, against all Shi’ites everywhere - a pledge that will probably raise the $25 million bounty already on his head. In the meantime I stand by my original assertion that deliberately partitioning Iraq now rather than being eventually forced to deal with a de facto partitioned Iraq will avoid the inevitable bloodshed in between times.

How did they manage this?

The summit has failed to agree a definition of terrorism.

But the UN Security Council backed a resolution brought forward by the UK calling on all states to outlaw incitement to terrorism.

How do you outlaw incitement to something you can’t even define?

The UN’s difficulty with a definition stems from the old ‘one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter’ school of thought. There is some truth in this of course.

But if you need a definition of terrorism then maybe one has to consider who the ‘fighters’ are, whether they’re part of a recognised army, who they attack - and how - and whether they act in accordance with internationally agreed standards of warfare. Some combination of factors from these - and, probably, a number of other criteria - to define terrorism in a meaningful way surely isn’t beyond the ability of the UN.

At the very least it would produce something concrete to argue over and refine.

Paul Beston The American Spectator comments on President Bush’s declaration that September 11 be known as ‘Patriot’s Day’ in honour of the sacrifices of firefighters, police officers, and rescue workers on that fateful day.

He suggests the attack in 2001 is analogous to the attack on Pearly Harbour in 1941 in that it was only the second time Americans had been attacked on their own soil - and both times they were unprepared. In 1941 however the US concentrated their efforts less on grieving and more on the business of avenging their dead.

Last Sunday, families gathered at Ground Zero to read the names of the dead, and emotions ran high as always. I wonder for how much longer we will encourage survivors to come back to the scene of their greatest torment and re-enact their grief in such a public way. Such rituals can only serve to keep old wounds forever fresh, and they provide an annual reminder for our enemies of the devastating effectiveness of their deeds.

Even while the wounds of Pearl Harbor were fresh, Franklin Roosevelt recognized that a great nation shouldn’t grovel so much in the mire of one of its darkest days, especially when it had a war to win. It is not true that repressing the pain of loss means forgetting it. That is one of our touchy-feely myths. Repression is a key to survival, and Americans once knew this intuitively.

Better that we privately ackowledge our feelings than turn them into an annual ‘Diana moment’. Nothing degrades real grief more than others - politicians, primarily - free-riding on its back in order to demonstrate some superior qualities of their own.