The brass at the Pentagon "reject" the notion that a civil war is brewing.  Well, I guess the Pentagon has to say that, although ex-Pentagon officials have been signing a different story for quite a while:

“It’s just political rhetoric to say we are not in a civil war. We’ve been in a civil war for a long time,” said Pat Lang, the former top Middle East intelligence official at the Pentagon. [Newsday, 5/12/05]

So which is it?  You be the judge.  Let’s look at events over the last 24-48 hours:

A day after a suspected al Qaeda bomb destroyed a major Shi’ite shrine, Iraq canceled all leave for the police and army and minority Sunni political leaders pulled out of U.S.-backed talks on forming a national unity government, accusing the ruling Shi’ites of fomenting dozens of attacks on Sunni mosques.

Washington, which wants stability in Iraq to help it extract around 130,000 U.S. troops, has also called for restraint, reflecting international fears that the oil-exporting country of 27 million may be slipping closer to all-out sectarian war.

The main Sunni religious authority made an extraordinary public criticism of the Shi’ites’ most revered clerical leader, accusing him of fuelling the violence by calling for protests […]

Police and military sources tallied more than 130 deaths, mostly of Sunnis, around the two biggest cities Baghdad and Basra in the 24 hours since the bloodless but highly symbolic bombing of the Shi’ite Golden Mosque in Samarra. Dozens of Sunni mosques have been attacked and several burned to the ground.

Certainly has the earmarks of a civil war, yes?  And we’re still in the crossfire.  Seven U.S. soldiers killed in the past 24 hours.

UPDATE:  More civil war deniers over at GOP.com.  Iraq is going great, they say, because mail carriers are carrying one third the amount of mail they did before the invasion, instead of one fifth.  (GOP.com cites the New York Times as its source, but fails to tell us what NYT added — i.e., that more and more Iraqi mail carriers are getting shot at).