Iraq is such a complete mess. According to an article in this month's
Foreign Affairs, Bush's
Iraqification plan, based on
"Vietnamization," is the worst possible approach, as
it arms the participants in a civil war.
Clearly what is going on in Iraq IS a low grade civii war; hundreds of Iraqis are being killed each month, killed by other Iraqis who practice a different brand of religion. A lesser number of Americans are killed. The involvement of foreign fighters is small. It's a civil war. What else do you call it? Extreme Dodgeball? It is not an all-out civil war, not yet....but, if we continue to enable militias-disguised-as-armies/police, it will become an all-out conflict.
MORE BELOW
This weekend, three experts got on board with the civil war concept: Jack Murtha you already know about. Two others are reported by
ABC: one is an ex-general, and the other is a respected conservative think tanker.
"We're in a civil war now; it's just that not everybody's joined in," said retired Army Maj. Gen. William L. Nash, a former military commander in Bosnia-Herzegovina. "...
Anthony Cordesman... at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, ... "If you talk to U.S. intelligence officers and military people privately, they'd say we've been involved in low level civil war with very slowly increasing intensity....
According to the
WaPo, even the public is getting the idea.
Murtha and some others have come out for a withdrawal; the latest is
Sen. Tom Harkin of Iowa. Bush's "plan" seems to be for a gradual withdrawal based on the idea/propaganda that Iraq's troubles are based on foreign fighters/turrrrrsts, and that as the Iraqi army "stands up, we can stand down." This approach obviously didn't work in Vietnam, and it will be a disaster in Iraq, for different reasons. In Vietnam, we were trying to strengthen the South Vietnamese against an "external" threat. The problem with this approach in Iraq is that this is a civil war, and arming the Iraqis amounts to pouring gasoline on the fire, says one prominent expert.
Stephen Biddle, Senior Fellow in Defense Policy at the Council on Foreign Relations and the author of Military Power, from Foreign Affairs, March/April 2006,.
Summary: Most discussions of U.S. policy in Iraq assume that it should be informed by the lessons of Vietnam. But the conflict in Iraq today is a communal civil war, not a Maoist "people's war," and so those lessons are not valid. "Iraqization," in particular, is likely to make matters worse, not better.if the debate in Washington is Vietnam redux, the war in Iraq is not. The current struggle is not a Maoist "people's war" of national liberation; it is a communal civil war with very different dynamics. Although it is being fought at low intensity for now, it could easily escalate if Americans and Iraqis make the wrong choices.
Unfortunately, many of the policies dominating the debate are ill adapted to the war being fought. Turning over the responsibility for fighting the insurgents to local forces, in particular, is likely to make matters worse. Such a policy might have made sense in Vietnam, but in Iraq it threatens to exacerbate the communal tensions that underlie the conflict and undermine the power-sharing negotiations needed to end it. Washington must stop shifting the responsibility for the country's security to others and instead threaten to manipulate the military balance of power among Sunnis, Shiites, and Kurds in order to force them to come to a durable compromise. Only once an agreement is reached should Washington consider devolving significant military power and authority to local forces
This proposed approach of withholding military power from the Iraqis, unfortunately, would tie us into an era of peacekeeping which might well be 20 years long, as some have speculated. We would need two or three times as many soldiers to do the job. Twenty years of killing, draining our treasury, and making enemies throughout the world. Bush has totally screwed Iraq, and left us with impossible choices.
Juan Cole has speculated on the regional instability that would result if we left Iraq prematurely, and he is certainly no fan of Bush. Is it really "you broke it, you bought it?" Must we look forward to twenty years of war, a military draft, loss of our civil liberties, budgetary mayhem?
These are hard questions. In the end, I don't think the public will stand for a draft. That more than anything may decide the issue. I think we have to disengage. But I am not particularly proud of that choice: it is simply the lesser of two evils.
The other day, in a departure from his usual talking points, Bush gave a hint that he may be retreating from the "total victory" concept, when he suggested that
"the Iraqi people have to choose..."Bush is taking a lot of heat from Congressmen up for re-election. He may have to give some ground, or seem to. But it is difficult to see him changing directions.