"We're in a civil war now; it's just that not everybody's joined in," said retired Army Maj. Gen. William L. Nash, a former military commander in Bosnia-Herzegovina. "The failure to understand that the civil war is already taking place, just not necessarily at the maximum level, means that our counter measures are inadequate and therefore dangerous to our long-term interest.
[...]Anthony Cordesman, the Arleigh A. Burke chair in strategy at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told ABC News, "If you talk to U.S. intelligence officers and military people privately, they'd say we've been involved in low level civil war with very slowly increasing intensity since the transfer of power in June 2004."
Well that's one point of view. Perhaps they're simply being overly pessimistic about the level of violence that's going on right now. But even so, it's a hard call to make. Certainly the current level of violence is beyond the norms that have been established (such as there are). Especially now, one would not think that this would be a time for optimism. But of course, there's always someone who has to spout lines that make it seem like all is not lost.
In an interview on Fox News Sunday, however, U.S. Marine Gen. Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, disputed that.
"I think that the Iraqi people — Kurds, Shia, Sunni — walked up to the abyss, took the look in, didn't like what they saw, have pulled together, have pulled back from violence, and are working together to keep things calm and to find the right mix for their own government," Pace said.
That's a highly strange characterization for the present state of Iraq. I'm wondering if the various Sunni and Shiite factions know that they "pulled back from violence"? The article goes on to rebut this idea:
The sectarian violence over the weekend was lower in intensity than in the immediate aftermath of the bombing of the Askariya Mosque — one of the holiest Shiite sites — in Samarra on Feb. 22. But still, the sectarian violence continued.
On Saturday night, gunmen mowed down four people — killing two of them — at the Shiite Ahl al-Beit mosque in Kirkuk, North of Baghdad. On Sunday, at least two others were killed in a gun battle at the Sunni al-Noor mosque in the al-Jihad neighborhood of West Baghdad.
Shakir Mahmoud, a cleric at al-Noor mosque, claimed the attackers came from the Interior Ministry itself, which is controlled by Shiites and has been accused of allowing, if not permitting, Shiite militias.
"The group consisted of 10 cars, care used only by the Interior Ministry," Shakir said. "The uniforms are only worn by the Interior Ministry. They attacked the mosque."
This brings up another point, which is reflected in an earlier post by Xanthippas, taken from Stephen Biddle's article in Foreign Affairs.
Iraq's Sunnis perceive the "national" army and police force as a Shiite-Kurdish militia on steroids. Sunni populations are unlikely to welcome protection provided by their ethnic or sectarian rivals; to them, the defense forces look like agents of a hostile occupation. And the more threatened the Sunnis feel, the more likely they are to fight back even harder. The bigger, stronger, better trained, and better equipped the Iraqi forces become, the worse the communal tensions that underlie the whole conflict will get.
And back to the ABC article:
Nash told ABC News, "The vast majority of the personnel in the army come from the Shiite and the Kurd population. And what we need to understand is that a political settlement — not brokered, but insisted upon by the U.S. — that gives equitable treatment to all factions is what we need."
But as Biddle's article pointed out, this does not mean you want to create an ineffectual multi-ethnic army, or an effectual but uncontrollable army along ethnic lines.
Events have occurred that brought about violence on a larger scale along the same lines they've always had. But right now our window of opportunity for solving this problem is shrinking.
Whether or not this is civil war, the fighting is not yet a broad national conflict, since an overwhelming majority of the attacks are in just four out of Iraq's 18 provinces. The question is whether it will spread.
It's not really a question of whether the violence will spread. It's a question of how long it will take. These guys aren't going to get tired and go home. While the average Iraqi doesn't want to be involved in any war, there are enough people who do that they can cause a massive outbreak of violence. The question is whether we can do anything to stop its growth in time.
2 comments:
Things are certainly grim. Even if we adopted Biddle's plan entirely, and we could be assured that the plan would work, we're talking about years of low level violence before either side will understand that they cannot better their position through violence. We have to persuade all sides that they can obtain nothing more by violence than what they will obtain by peace, but unfortunately that requires we stay in Iraq long enough to teach them that lesson, if that lesson can even be learned. If all three main factions regard as the power that will either help them maintain their position, elevate them if they've lost power relative to the others, or push them down if they try to gain power relative to the others, there is some hope. But it's going to be an awfully long time before we know.
I'm not that great a historian or political scientist, so it doesn't surprise me that I can't think of any parallel situation in the past where civil war was successfully averted and all those innocent lives saved. Even Yugoslavia fell apart eventually, after decades of peaceful existence under a dictator.
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