On the March 16 edition of Hannity & Colmes, Fox News political analyst Dick Morris, in a discussion about the Iraq war with co-host Alan Colmes, called the sectarian violence in Iraq “negotiation, Iraqi style” and said that it is “basically a financial negotiation.” Morris further stated that the violence between warring Iraqi factions is merely “part of the democratic process going on.”
As Media Matters for America noted, Dick Morris also claimed on the March 13 edition of Fox News' The O'Reilly Factor that there is no civil war coming to Iraq because “when Iraqi politicians negotiate over the coalition of their cabinet, they bomb each other's mosques.”
From the March 16 edition of Fox News' Hannity & Colmes:
COLMES: You call the bombings of mosques; you call the targeting of civilians by some of the Shiites; you call the corpses being dragged through the street -- you call that a negotiation?
MORRIS: Yep. I sure do, Alan. I didn't invent the Iraqi style. You know, they say divorce, Italian style? This is negotiation, Iraqi style. What's going on right now is the Shiites and the Sunnis are trying to get the upper hand militarily in the street so as to get the upper hand in the coalition government.
COLMES: Was the North vs. South in America a negotiation back in the last century? Two centuries ago?
MORRIS: No.
COLMES: No?
MORRIS: No, but Kansas was before it. And what's going on now is they're fighting over oil revenues. The whole deal is the Shiites want all of the oil revenues and the Sunnis want their piece of the oil revenues but the Sunni region doesn't produce a lot of oil. And what's going on now is basically a financial negotiation, but they're an immature democracy. They're not used to the ways of the world and whereas Americans threaten censure and impeachment and shut the government down, the Iraqis blow up mosques.
COLMES: Well, let's hope that this doesn't go on much longer, but if it does --
MORRIS: But this is part of the democratic process going on.
Morris's reference to Kansas is presumably a reference to the 1850s debate over whether Kansas would be allowed to permit slavery, spurred by a controversial 1854 law that allowed Kansas residents to decide on the matter. Clashes between pro-slavery and anti-slavery factions resulted in the burning of the town of Lawrence, Kansas, by pro-slavery settlers, the killing of slavery sympathizers by abolitionist John Brown and his supporters, and the beating of anti-slavery Sen. Charles Sumner on the Senate floor by a pro-slavery member of Congress after Sumner gave a speech asserting that senators who supported the law, thus opening up the possibility of slavery in another state, were committing a “crime against Kansas.”
