Civil War in Iraq?

I watched a segment on the Today show this morning in which a couple of talking heads were discussing the fact that they envision civil war erupting in Iraq over the bombing, just yesterday, of a Shiite Mosque. Well, this made me curious, so I went online and looked up the meaning of the expression. Here's what I found...

From Dictionary.com: Civil War - A war between factions or regions of the same country.

Now - given all of the bombings, shootings, fighting and inability of the Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds to form a government, when the hell has Iraq NOT been in a civil war since we invaded? How will these idiots on TV ever know when a civil war begins? Will there be a difference?

From Think Progress - click here to visit their site...

Two months after parliamentary elections that split largely along ethnic lines, Iraq still has no government and sectarian violence threatens to foment existing tensions and throw the country into a full-blown civil war. Since insurgents bombed one of Iraq's holiest Shiite sites yesterday -- destroying the "gleaming dome of the 1,200-year-old Askariya shrine" -- 90 Sunni mosques have been attacked and at least 50 people, including three Sunni clerics, have been killed.

"This could be a tipping point,'' says Juan Cole, a historian of Islam at the University of Michigan and author of the blog Informed Comment. Although Bush continues to insist that Iraq's political progress is "amazing" and State Department officials downplay the violence, the White House still has no plan to reduce sectarian tensions. The New York Times recently reported, "Of all of the changes that have swept Iraqi society since the American invasion almost three years ago, one of the quieter ones, yet also one of the most profound, has been the increased identification with one's own sect. In the poisonous new mix of violence, sectarian politics and lawlessness, families are turning inward to protect themselves." By invading Iraq without a plan for stability, President Bush has created a new haven for international terrorists and brought the country to the brink of a full-blown sectarian civil war.