Fareed Zakaria (who I used to find rather attractive) made a very ugly statement on "This Week" this week. Stepanopolous asked him if the rioting after the bombing of the Golden Mosque meant that an Iraqi Civil War was now underway.

With a stone cold face he nearly spat his answer "Two hundred dead does not a civil war make." Then went on to mumble something to the effect that a "true" civil war indicator would be the mobilization of sectarian militias, blah blah blah.

Okay, Fareed, try this on for size: WaPo:

BAGHDAD, Feb. 27 -- Grisly attacks and other sectarian violence unleashed by last week's bombing of a Shiite shrine have killed more than 1,300 Iraqis, making the past few days the deadliest of the war outside major U.S. offensives, according to Baghdad's main morgue. The toll was more than three times higher than the figure previously reported by the U.S. military and the news media.

I think we can tell why the town's been under curfew--they didn't want reporters showing up and collecting census data at the morgue.

Oh, and Fareed, you'll love this part:

Many of the bodies had their hands still bound -- and many of them had wound up at the morgue after what their families said was their abduction by the Mahdi Army, the Shiite militia of cleric Moqtada al-Sadr.

Methinks Moqtada's "rising young radical cleric" spiffy image is going to take a bit of a beating shortly. And remember these bodies kept piling up after al-Sadr made that impassioned speech, heavily covered on US news outlets, imploring Iraqi Muslims to bond together, to pray together in each other's mosques, to not kill each other. And most especially to bond together in the common cause of expelling the Crusaders.

That, of course, would be us. Is that what Fahreed is going to take shelter behind next time he wants to crunch the numbers and explain why this isn't Civil War in Iraq yet?

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And a tip o' the Corrente hat to esteemed reader basilbeast for noting this oddity of Fareed's statement in the "This Week" post comments.

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Oh, and a postscript from my post of a few days ago about Calculating News Coverage of the Iraqi Civil War. Here are the numbers for the last three days I did this search:

2/23: "Civil War"--16,700. Subtract search term "Iraq"=11,800

2/26: "Civil War"--25,400. Subtract search term "Iraq"=11,300

2/27: "Civil War"--30,200. Subtract search term "Iraq"=11,800

So the rate of Civil Warring in the rest of the world (Nigeria, Liberia, Sri Lanka, China, Lebanon and Sudan are other Subtracted Search Terms pretty regularly) is holding steady. Except for that one place where stories using those words have tripled in the last four days.