There is a brilliant essay on the Iraq “Civil War” over at Foreign Policy by James D. Fearon, a Geballe Professor in the School of Humanities and Sciences and Professor of Political Science at Stanford University. Fearon’s main point is that, looking at the history of civil wars, there is no way the U.S. can turn the tide of the one taking place in Iraq. There will no doubt be more bloodshed, but civil wars are conflicts that must solve themselves.
The White House still avoids the label, but by any reasonable historical standard, the Iraqi civil war has begun. The record of past such wars suggests that Washington cannot stop this one -- and that Iraqis will be able to reach a power-sharing deal only after much more fighting, if then. The United States can help bring about a settlement eventually by balancing Iraqi factions from afar, but there is little it can do to avert bloodshed now.
The Iraq War seems to have an identity crisis, at least from the administration’s point-of-view. Their refusal to label this conflict a civil war hinders their ability to not only look at it objectively but to deal with it using relevant strategies.
Different types of wars are fought in different ways. This isn’t a straight genocidal conflict, this isn’t merely a dictator trying to take over a country. This is a country that, once freed from one oppressor is struggling to define itself. Who are we to solve their identity crisis?
How would America have felt if in the middle of the Civil War some third-party came in and told us how we should solve our problem, and then got into conflict with and gave arms and training to both sides? I would think that would makes us resent that third-party quite a bit. The U.S. Civil War, after a long and bloody conflict that killed over a half-million Americans, grudgingly worked itself out.
We must leave this up to the Iraqis. Sure there will be casualties and yes there will be tragedy, but that is the world we’ve built for ourselves. I don’t agree with war at all, but that seems to be the only we humans have figured out to solve our problems. However their fight is not our fight, our fight is in Afghanistan. Al-Qaeda is regaining a foothold there because our attention is elsewhere.
If the administration truly wants to fight terrorism and truly wants the American public as well as Congress to mobilize behind them, they need to stop lying to us and to themselves about what this war is and how it needs to be solved. Until then, it will just continue to spiral downward into chaos.