Bush administration: "Civil War? There is no civil war!" Iraq Government: "We need to prepare for a civil war that will never end!"

Iraq's defense minister warned on Saturday of a "civil war" that "will never end" and said he was ready to put tanks on the streets as sectarian violence flared despite a second day of curfew in Baghdad.

Extending a traffic ban in the capital to Monday after battles around Sunni mosques and a car bomb in a holy Shi'ite city, leaders scrambled to break a round of reprisals sparked by a suspected al Qaeda bombing of a Shi'ite shrine on Wednesday.

The gravest crisis since the U.S. invasion in 2003 threatens Washington's hopes of withdrawing its 136,000 troops from Iraq.

"If there is a civil war in this country it will never end," Defense Minister Saadoun al-Dulaimi, a minority Sunni Muslim in the Shi'ite-led interim government, told a news conference.

"We are ready to fill the streets with armored vehicles."

Don't you sometimes wish that you could see the world throught the rosy glasses that the White House staff are all apparently wearing?

"Dick Cheney shot a man in the face! Well thank goodness he did not shoot himself! That would have been just terrible!"

"There is a civil war brewing in Iraq? No that is just the heated debate that always precedes Democracy. I am sure our founding fathers took to the streets and blew each other up as well."

"Senior citizens cannot figure out the Medicare drug program? Well this will just give the elderly an opportunity to spend hours on the phone interacting with their pharmacists. This will fill their days with purpose. Old people love that!"

Maybe they just have really good drugs? Really, really powerful drugs! And at this point maybe they could hook a brother up. I need something to get through this next three years!