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Don't blame America for Iraqis' choice of
civil war
2.2.2007
By
Charles.Krauthammer |
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February 2, 2007
WASHINGTON - This week the internecine
warfare in Iraq, already bewildering - Sunni vs.
Shiite, Kurd vs. Arab, jihadist vs. infidel, with
various Iranians, Syrians and assorted freelancers
thrown into the maelstrom - went bizarre. In one of
the biggest battles of the war, Iraqi troops
reinforced by Americans wiped out a heavily armed,
well-entrenched millenarian Shiite sect preparing to
take over Najaf, kill the moderate Shiite clergy
(including Grand Ayatollah Sistani) and proclaim its
leader the returned messiah.
The battle was a success - 263 extremists killed,
502 captured. But the sight of the U.S. caught
within a Shiite-Shiite fight within the larger
Shiite-Sunni civil war can only lead to further
discouragement of Americans, already deeply dismayed
at the notion of being caught in the middle of
endless civil strife.
There are of course many reasons for these schisms.
Some, like the fundamental division between Sunni
and Shiite, are ancient. Some of the wounds are more
contemporary, most notably the social devastation
and political ruin brought upon the country by 30
years of Saddamist totalitarianism and its
particularly sadistic persecution of Shiites and
Kurds.
America comes and liberates them from the tyrant who
kept everyone living in fear, and the ancient
animosities and more recent resentments begin to
play themselves out to deadly effect. Tens of
thousands of Iraqis have died, the overwhelming
majority of them killed by Sunni insurgents,
Baathist dead-enders and their al-Qaida allies who
carry on the Saddamist pogroms.
Much of their killing - the murder of innocent
Shiites in their mosques and markets - is bereft of
politics. It is meant to satisfy instead an
atavistic hatred of the Shiite heresy. The late al-Qaida
leader in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, was even
chided by headquarters in Afghanistan for his relish
in killing Shiites for the sport of it.
Iraqis were given their freedom and yet many have
chosen civil war. Among all these religious
prejudices, ancient wounds, social resentments and
tribal antagonisms, who gets the blame for the
rivers of blood? You can always count on some to
find the blame in America. "We did not give them a
republic," insists Newsweek's Fareed Zakaria. "We
gave them a civil war."
Of all the accounts of the current situation, this
is by far the most stupid. And the most pernicious.
Did Britain "give" India the Hindu-Muslim war of
1947-48 that killed a million souls and ethnically
cleansed 12 million more? The Jewish-Arab wars in
Palestine? The tribal wars of post-colonial Uganda?
We gave them a civil war? Why? Because we failed to
prevent it? Do the police in America have on their
hands the blood of the 16,000 murders they failed to
prevent last year?
Thousands of brave American soldiers have died
trying to counter, put down and prevent civil
strife. They fight Sunni insurgents in Fallujah,
Ramadi and Baghdad, trying to keep them from sending
yet one more suicide bomber into a crowded Shiite
market. They hunt Shiite death squads in Baghdad to
keep them from rounding up random Sunnis and
torturing them to death. Just this week, we lost two
helicopter pilots who were supporting the troops on
the ground fighting the "Soldiers of Heaven" outside
Najaf to prevent the slaughter of innocents in a
Shiite-Shiite war within a war.
Our entire strategy has been to fight one side and
then the other to try to prevent sectarian violence
- a policy that has been one of the leading reasons
why Americans are ready to quit and walk away. They
can understand one-front wars, but they can't
understand two-, three- and four-front wars, with
Americans fighting any and all in sequence and
sometimes in combination.
And at the political level, we've been doing
everything we can to bring reconciliation. We got
the Sunnis to participate in elections and then in
parliament. Who is pushing the Shiite-Kurdish
coalition for a law that would distribute oil
revenues to the Sunnis? Who is pushing for a more
broad-based government to exclude Moqtada al-Sadr
and his sectarian Mahdi Army?
We have made a lot of mistakes in Iraq. But when
Arabs kill Arabs and Shiites kill Shiites and Sunnis
kill all in a spasm of violence that is blind and
furious and has roots in hatreds born long before
America was even a republic, to place the blame on
the one player, the one country, the one military
that has done more than any other to try to separate
the combatants and bring conciliation is simply
perverse.
It infantilizes Arabs. It demonizes Americans. It
willfully overlooks the plainest of facts: Iraq is
their country. We midwifed their freedom. They chose
civil war.
washingtonpost com
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