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“We must cooperate and
work together against this danger...of civil war,”
said Iraq’s President Jalal Talabani, but others
think that the civil war has already arrived. At
least 130 people, almost all of them Sunnis, were
murdered in reprisal killings, and over a hundred
Sunni mosques attacked, in the 24 hours after the
destruction of the Al-Askariya shrine in Samarra,
sacred to the Shiites, on Feb. 22. But it is not yet
time to say that Iraq has slid irrevocably into
civil war.
The casualties of the sectarian violence in Iraq are
already comparable to those in the Lebanese civil
war — a couple of dozen killed on slow days, a
hundred or so on the worst days — but Iraq has about
eight times as many people as Lebanon, so there is
still some distance to go. And Iraq may never go the
full distance, because it is hard to hold a proper
civil war unless the different ethnic or religious
groups hold separate territories.
The Kurds do, of course, and it is unlikely that the
fighting will ever spread to the north of what now
is Iraq, for Kurdistan is already effectively a
separate country with its own army. The Kurds are
currently allied with the Shiite Arab religious
parties of southern Iraq who control politics in the
Arabic-speaking eighty percent of Iraq, but even if
that alliance broke the Shiites could not take back
the north. The worst that might happen is ethnic
cleansing around Kirkuk and its oilfields, where
Saddam Hussein encouraged Arab settlement to erode
Kurdish dominance of the area.
Southern Iraq is already controlled by the militias
of the Shiite religious parties, and has only a
small minority of Sunnis. Baghdad and the “Sunni
Triangle” in central Iraq are the only potential
battlegrounds of an Iraqi civil war, but even there
it is hard to have a real civil war, because only
one side has an army.
The old, predominantly Sunni Arab army of Iraq was
disbanded by Proconsul Paul Bremer soon after the
American occupation of Iraq. The new army and police
force being trained by the US forces are almost
entirely Shiite (except in Kurdistan, where they are
entirely Kurdish). Indeed, many of Iraq’s soldiers
are members of existing Shiite and Kurdish militias
who have been shifted onto the payroll of the state.
So how can you have a civil war? All the Sunnis are
capable of at the moment is guerrilla attacks and
terrorism. Unless really substantial aid and
reinforcements come in from other Arab countries,
they are unlikely to be able to move beyond that.
They can kill some American soldiers (they are
currently accounting for about a thousand a year),
and they can play a tit-for-tat game of kidnapping
and murder with the Shiite militias and the Interior
Ministry’s death squads, but they cannot really
challenge Shiite control of Arab Iraq.
Three years after the American invasion of Iraq,
it’s possible to discern many of the final results
of this “war of choice to install some democracy in
the heart of the Arab world,” as New York Times
columnist Tom Friedman called it just before the
invasion began. It is a study in unintended
consequences, and a good argument for the rule that
ideological crusaders must listen to the experts
even though they know that their hearts are pure.
Those consequences will include: The emergence of an
independent Kurdish state in what used to be
northern Iraq. The destruction of the old, secular
Iraq, and the installation of a thinly disguised
Shiite theocracy in the Arabic-speaking parts of the
country.
A perpetual, low-grade insurgency by the Sunni Arab
minority against the Shiite state, but no change in
their current desperate circumstances unless
neighboring Arab states become involved. The
destruction of the secular middle class in Arab
Iraq. Most of these people are abandoning the
country as fast as they can, for they know that all
the future holds is Iranian-style social rules plus
an unending Sunni insurgency. The extension of
Iran’s power and influence to the borders of Saudi
Arabia and Jordan. The United States has handed Iraq
to Iran on a plate.
American troops will remain in Iraq for several
years, probably right down to the November, 2008
election, because it is impossible for the Bush
administration to pull out without admitting a
ghastly blunder. Too many people have died for
“sorry” to suffice.
US troops stayed in Vietnam for five years after
Richard Nixon was first elected in 1968 on a promise
to find an “honorable” way out, while Henry
Kissinger searched for a formula that would separate
US withdrawal from total defeat for its Vietnamese
clients by a “decent interval” of a couple of years.
Two-thirds of all US casualties in Vietnam occurred
during that period. We are probably going to go
through that charade again, but it won’t change any
of the outcomes.
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