Commentary Week in Review: Iraq and Latin America Predominate

The spiking violence in Iraq is part of an enemy strategy to affect upcoming U.S. elections. French lawmakers are out of control. No, it's the Turks who need to check themselves. The Latin American ideological saga continues. The United States must not ignore the important elections in Congo. And, yes, more North Korea.

It was a thematically diverse week in the world's English-language opinion pages. Much of the discussion about Iraq centered on what many are now calling a civil war pitting Sunni and Shiite Muslims against each other. Jeff Stein offered a jaw-dropper in the Oct. 17 New York Times when he explained that for the past several months he has wrapped up "lengthy interviews with Washington counterterrorism officials with a fundamental question: 'Do you know the difference between a Sunni and a Shiite?'"

It's an important question, Stein explained, given that "the 1,400-year Sunni-Shiite rivalry is playing out in the streets of Baghdad, raising the specter of a breakup of Iraq into antagonistic states, one backed by Shiite Iran and the other by Saudi Arabia and other Sunni states."