[Mb-civic] WOW: Let Them Have Their Civil War - Caleb Carr - Washington Post Op-Ed

[William Swiggard]

Let Them Have Their Civil War
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By Caleb Carr
The Washington Post
Sunday, April 9, 2006; B01

As the violence in Iraq has expanded, analysts have been asking: Are we 
witnessing the beginning of a formal Iraqi civil war? But far more 
important when we consider what role our troops might play in the 
extended fighting is the question: Does the United States have any right 
to forcibly stop such a war, when and if it begins?

Civil war, as defined by many generations of military theorists, shares 
characteristics with insurgencies and revolutions, but there are 
distinct differences, too. Although insurgencies are contests of rival 
groups, insurgents need not control any appreciable territory to be 
effective. Civil wars, on the other hand, involve two or more armed 
groups, each controlling part of a country. And although civil wars, 
like revolutions, can be influenced by outside forces as well as 
ideological considerations, sometimes they are merely struggles for 
power. Still others -- like the American Civil War -- are contests over 
not just politics or power, but some high motivating moral principle as 
well.

No such principle would seem to be at play in Iraq, for one of the 
insurgency's glaring deficiencies has always been its lack of a coherent 
ideological rallying point for all Iraqis. Its aim, by contrast, has 
been simple: the return to power of the Sunni Muslim minority that held 
sway under Saddam Hussein, or, failing that, the kind of endless anarchy 
that will make any other government's rule impossible. The insurgents 
have succeeded at the latter: Although an Iraqi National Assembly and 
executive branch have been created and elected, the assembly has met 
only once and briefly, and Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jafari is widely 
viewed as ineffectual and corrupt. Americans, meanwhile, are voicing 
overwhelming condemnation of the war, creating a perhaps unbridgeable 
gulf between themselves and the Bush administration. This has always 
been a basic definition of insurgent success, as it tends to severely 
restrict the counterinsurgents' time frame for operations.

Thus, all the courage that went into organizing and carrying out Iraqi 
elections would seem to have produced a government unworthy of the 
sacrifices made to bring it into being. The resulting frustration is 
clear in the words and increasingly deadly actions of many Iraqis who 
appear to be giving up on a political solution to their country's 
problems. This means mainly the once-persecuted Shiites (who are showing 
dangerous signs of splintering into fighting sub-factions) and Kurds.

The more the Iraqi government and its U.S. advocates talk about 
"fairness" for the Sunni minority, the more the violence seems to 
escalate. The insurgents do not want their people seduced into 
participating in the new Iraq, while the Kurds and Shiites seem 
reluctant to afford true national power to the very people who not only 
made Hussein's genocidal rule possible, but are also leading the insurgency.

This may not be textbook civil war, but it is certainly shaping up to be 
the beginning of one.

If Americans ever had the power to stave off such a conflict, the past 
three years of misguided military policy have exhausted it. But military 
ability to stop a civil war is not the key issue. Nor should excessive 
concern for our own national security cloud our policy decisions: The 
first casualties of any expanded fighting will almost certainly be both 
Saddam Hussein (who has been kept alive thanks to U.S. insistence on his 
trial -- and thanks to U.S. guards) as well as Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who 
is now despised more than Hussein by many Iraqis. No, the real issue of 
importance for Americans with regard to any impending Iraqi civil war 
is: Are we morally justified in trying to prevent it?

Before answering, Americans should consider a few facts from our own 
national experience. Our Civil War was viewed as an exercise in 
horrendously destructive national suicide by most of the nations of 
Europe -- and an expensive one at that, for it cut off European textile 
mills from Southern cotton. Britain and one or two of her fellow members 
in the European balance of power considered intervening -- but 
intervention was averted, mostly through the careful warnings of 
President Abraham Lincoln and his diplomatic corps. They stressed that 
civil war in America was a more morally complex affair than the usual 
European grab for power. It was, at its heart, a contest to end the 
institution of slavery.

If the Europeans found its violence deplorable and horrifying, said 
Lincoln, that was understandable; so did he. But as he explained in his 
second inaugural address, in words that we revere so deeply that we have 
carved them into his memorial:

"If God wills that [the war] continue until all the wealth piled by the 
bondman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, 
and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by 
another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so 
still it must be said, 'The judgments of the Lord are true and righteous 
altogether.' "

Iraqis may refer to their Lord by a different name, but the principle in 
their case is the same. We are not dealing with several groups of 
roughly equal recent experience; we are dealing with one extreme 
minority, the Sunnis, many of whom have for years, under the leadership 
of the worst international tyrant since Pol Pot, persecuted and murdered 
the other two -- on a genocidal scale.

As Americans, we cannot condone mass murder as a form of vengeance. But 
every time an American official tries to tell the Shiites and the Kurds 
(along with the many smaller minorities in Iraq) that they are not 
entitled to the same judgments and justice as we ourselves received and 
wrought from 1861 to 1865, they make civil war in that country more -- 
not less -- likely. Such statements reveal the blatantly paternalistic, 
even racist, opinion that what was necessary in the American experience 
is not something for which the Iraqis are ready or qualified.

Indeed, if polls in Iraq are reliable (and they seem to have been, thus 
far) then the American presence there is only increasing the likelihood 
that if civil war comes, it will be more vicious. The presence of U.S. 
troops, noble as their efforts at control may be, only fuels more rage, 
since they keep Kurdish and Shiite forces at bay while failing to stop 
the Sunnis from committing daily murder.

And where is the justice for those murders? It does not emanate from 
either an assembly that has met once in three months or a U.S.-led 
coalition that continues to display an extraordinary level of concern 
for the Sunnis. It may well come, in the end, only from allowing the 
Kurds and Shiites to fight -- yes, to bloodily settle accounts -- with 
the Sunnis for themselves.

Not only is it impossible for Americans to stand in the way of an 
internal Iraqi balancing of the scales, it also reeks of hypocrisy. We 
went to Iraq, according to our president, to make Iraqis free. If that 
is so, and if their first decision as a free people is to declare war 
upon one another, just as Americans once did, where do we derive the 
right to tell them they may not? We cannot, again, condone genocide (we 
can even cut it short by keeping land and air units in the region); but 
neither can we any longer delay justice -- even if it is to be forcibly 
dispensed.

Yet right now, that appears to be the unenviable position into which the 
Bush administration and Iraqi insurgents have thrust our troops. Those 
troops have fulfilled their primary mission of bringing down the Hussein 
regime, and they have done it well, but even they cannot create or 
enforce a just peace in a foreign country -- a laundry list of failed 
recent attempts in other nations should tell us that.

If the Iraqis wish to try it on their own, better that we allow them to 
use a mixture of their own militias and conventional forces -- the kind 
of combination that fought our Civil War. That way, we at least accord 
them the respect of equals. They may even remember, one day, that we 
did. And that memory may, over time, ease the bitterness created by 
occupation.

Caleb Carr is the author of "The Lessons of Terror: A History of Warfare 
Against Civilians" (Random House). He teaches military studies at Bard 
College.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/04/07/AR2006040702031.html?nav=hcmodule
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