Which Iraq War Do You Want To End?We're fighting at least three of them.
Posted Monday, Aug. 27, 2007, at 4:56 PM ET
When people say that they want to end the war in Iraq, I always want to ask them which war they mean. There are currently at least three wars, along with several subconflicts, being fought on Iraqi soil. The first, tragically, is the battle for mastery between Sunni and Shiite. The second is the campaign to isolate and defeat al-Qaida in Mesopotamia. The third is the struggle of Iraq's Kurdish minority to defend and consolidate its regional government in the north.
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StumbleUponTaking these in reverse order, we can point to Kurdistan as the most outstanding success of the past four years, with its economically flourishing provinces run along broadly secular lines, and with the old Kurd-on-Kurd civil war now in real abeyance for almost a decade (which shows that people can and do come to their senses). The Kurds are also active in the center of the country; their ministers of foreign affairs and water are universally regarded as the most capable and intelligent, and they have also been secure enough to lend units of their own peshmerga forces to the coalition's efforts in Baghdad, Fallujah, and elsewhere. The forces of AQM do not care to tackle this real people's army, preferring to concentrate their attacks on the defenseless, and although there have been truck-bomb attacks in the Kurdish capital of Erbil and in the still-disputed city of Kirkuk, these are so far pinprick events. (Appalling to record, though, a recent and much-disputed incident near Erbil airport has led to a temporary suspension of some international flights to Kurdistan.)
On the second front, everything I hear by e-mail from soldiers in Anbar province and some well-attested other reports suggest (see my Slate column of Aug. 13) that the venomous rabble of foreign murderers and local psychopaths that goes to make up AQM has insanely overplayed its hand, lost all hope of local support, and is becoming even more vicious as its cadres are defeated. This means that there is also political separation and polarization within the Sunni Arab community. A recent wire-service report even suggested that the underground remnant of the Baath Party has broken off relations with AQM. It must say something when even Saddam's old goons find themselves repelled by anybody's tactics. One must not declare victory too soon, but if the United States has in fact succeeded in not only smashing but discrediting al-Qaida in a major Arab and Muslim country, that must count as a historic achievement.
The third area of combat is the most depressing. The Maliki government, in my opinion, showed its irredeemably sectarian character a long time ago by the dirty manner in which it carried out the execution of Saddam Hussein. Maliki himself has recently attacked the coalition forces for carrying out raids in Shiite districts of Baghdad. Perhaps he ought to be told that he is not being lent our armed forces for the purpose of installing Shiite power. The secular parties have walked out of his shaky Cabinet, and it is on these forces that our moral support should be concentrated. Let's put it like this: An American family that lost a son or a daughter in the defense of free Kurdistan or in the struggle against AQM could console itself that the death was in a worthwhile cause. The same could not be said for a soldier who fell in some murky street engagement, shot in the back by a uniformed policeman who was doing double duty as a member of a theocratic Shiite militia.
In Basra and elsewhere, these Shiite militias replicate the division among the Sunnis by fighting among themselves and by the degree to which they do or do not reflect the interference of Iran in Iraqi affairs. This subconflict—or these subconflicts—makes it hard to accept the proposal made by some U.S. politicians and pundits to the effect that the country should be partitioned along ethnic and religious lines. In that event, we would quite probably not end up with three neatly demarcated mini-states, one each in a three-way split among Sunni Arab, Shiite, and Kurd. Instead, there could be partitions within the partition, with Iran and Saudi Arabia becoming patrons of their favorite proxies and, in the meantime, a huge impetus given to the "cleansing" of hitherto-mixed cities and provinces. (This, by the way, as I never tire of saying, is what would have happened to Iraq when Saddam's regime collapsed and the country became prey to neighboring states and to the consequences of 30 years of "divide and rule" politics.)
The ability to distinguish among these different definitions of the "war" is what ought to define the difference between a serious politician and a political opportunist, both in Iraq and in America. The obliteration of political life and civil society by Saddam Hussein's fascism has meant that most of the successor political figures are paltry (and the Kurdish exception to this exactly proves the point: Kurdistan escaped from Baathist control a full decade before the rest of Iraq did). It will take a good while before any plausible nonsectarian figures can emerge from the wasteland and also brave the climate of murder and intimidation that the forces of the last dictatorship, and the would-be enforcers of an even worse future one, have created. Meanwhile, it is all very well for Sens. Clinton and Levin to denounce the Maliki government and to say that he and his Dawa Party colleagues are not worth fighting for. But what do they say about the other two wars? Sen. Clinton in particular has said several times in the past that we cannot, for example, abandon the Kurds as we once did before. Should she not be asked if this is still her view? And did I miss what Sen. Levin had to say about the battle against AQM? The next election is rightly going to be fought, to a considerable extent, over the question of Iraq. Answers to these questions about that question are a test of seriousness that all voters should be keeping in mind.
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Remarks from the Fray:
I played scrabble with my wife last night. She thinks she won since at the end of it she scored more points than I did. Little did she know we were really playing 3 different games of scrabble. She deluded herself in to thinking she won without realizing that, even though there were still tiles left, I had decided that every half hour would mark the end of a game. Foolish of her. Oh and I made that decision after the game was over so that, having won two of the three half hour periods, I was victorious. Weeee!
Of course you can always slice things up to make things look better (time, area, duration, population all come to mind as ways to demarcate conflicts). The problem is that a) You have to give a reason for cutting things up that way other than that it makes you look good (which Hitchens doesn't) and b) You have to acknowledge that there are also ways to cut things up to make it look worse (Again, not done).
--acro101
(To reply, click here.)
The war in Iraq I want to end is the one we're fighting. How many times has the mission changed? Four? Six? Who keeps count anymore? Every time our troops accomplish the mission we give them, Bush/Cheney say, "No. Now you have to do this." I can not imagine the frustration they must feel as the second, third, fourth, fifth tours of duty come around. But I know they will do what they are asked to do for as long as we ask it.
Hitchens says there are 3 wars going on in Iraq. There is just one war in Iraq, the one we started "preemptively." Different factions are fighting, yes, but they all have a single goal, they want to have things their way.
The decision to go to war and to stay at war was made by politicians in Washington. The problem for us is that they can't decide what they want. To win? We win every time we fight. We could "win" our way across the continent until we ran into the Chinese and it still wouldn't put Iraq back together. No matter how things turn out, I doubt that Christopher Hitchens will ever be happy with the result. It's the war that matters to people like him, not the peace. As Bush pointed out with his references to the end of the Vietnam War, there are some who's thirst for destruction can never be satisfied. They are seldom the ones who go and fight in the wars they cheer on.
--Telemachus
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Once you have conceded that there are three separate wars going on, you can no longer use the same blanket justification for us staying there. If our main focus is the war on Al Qaeda, that purpose would be served best by more intelligence deployments and small, concentrated strike forces, not having hundreds of thousands of highly visible troops as sitting targets. If, on the other hand, our military is supposed to be the entire country's police force to prevent a sectarian war, we're gonna need a hell of a lot more people (and a hell of a lot more convincing of the public).
--achilleselbow
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Nothing builds national unity like the threat of partition, so perhaps the partition card could be used to prod Sunni Arabs and Shiites to get their act together?
Of course, I'm not talking about a partition among Kurds, Sunni Arabs and Shiites. I'm talking about threatening to partition Iraq among Iran, Saudia Arabia and possibly Turkey. In addition, one could produce an independent Kurdistan by getting Iran to exchange its northern Kurdish areas for any territory it acquires in southern Iraq's Shiite region.
The Kurds might prefer this scenario anyway, so Iraq's Sunni Arabs and Shiites would need to do more than simply reconcile among themselves: they'd also need to court the Kurds and convince them that they're better off as part of a united and stable Iraq -- otherwise, there wouldn't be an effective front against the threat of foreign partition.
Yes, it sounds crazy. But Hitchens is correct about the long-term prospects if Iraq doesn't start to unify: Iran and Saudi Arabia will eventually make a bid for the Iraqi regions that are already linked to them culturally and economically.
--Grotius_
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Hitchens says our presence in Iraq hasn't made things any worse than they eventually would have become anyway. Leaving aside the fact that this is nonsense, would he also have us believe that it somehow justifies our decision to invade? Not only is it ridiculous to think that Mr. Hitchens' predictive powers are such that he could ever make this claim with the confidence he projects (or should I say "never tire of" making this claim?), it is the single weakest argument I've ever heard advanced in supposed "support" of the war: we haven't made things worse, therefore it's all been worth our while, to say nothing of our blood.
It sounds more like something someone would say if they were trying to assuage their guilt for having lent fanatical support to an idea that's done so much damage to the world. I am disappointed to see that Hitchens would choose to fall back on this argument rather than admit that he was wrong, especially since he's made such a name for himself by spectacularly exposing charlatans and frauds.
--Malarkey
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