The constitution, instead of bringing Iraqis together, now serves as another concrete example of fracture and a dangerous trend towards civil war. This
piece details the slow march to the inevitable, as well as new admissions from the military.
I agree, that given the present state of Iraq, the threat of civil war seems inevitable. As
Shanin M. Cole points out
"partition is the consequence of failed colonialism." With this sentiment in mind, one has to wonder how our presence contributes to the march to civil war. It would be hard to argue that the American presence acts as a check on ethnic tensions, much easier to see us as instigators. If that is the case, and the seeds of civil war firmly in place, what is the point of our involvement?
Apparently, the military is now openly contemplating the prospects for civil war, with some frank admissions:
Some American military officers say the violence could worsen if the political system fractures further. "Maybe they just need to have their civil war," a senior military official in Baghdad said recently. "In this part of the world it's almost a way of life." He spoke on condition of anonymity because his opinions are at odds with official views.
The "way of life" crack is obviously a derogatory, somewhat racist comment, but the acknowledgement of inevitability is interesting to see how the military moves forward. Is the American goal to sit on the sidelines, while the country fractures and moves closer to war? If this is the predicament, I would argue this only cements the withdrawal option. If war is looming anyways, what purpose is there to having further American casualities. Our presence doesn't make the situation better, or decrease the odds of war, so the whole exercise reaches a new threshhold of pointlessness.
Some concrete examples of the worsening situation, and our own inability to do anything to curb it:
The four-week moving average of attacks - which smoothes out daily fluctuations - has had peaks and valleys but generally has stayed about the same or increased during the past 18 months, according to military statistics. Perhaps most worrying, the weekly number of effective attacks - those that wounded or killed American and Iraqi troops or civilians -
has on average more than doubled since February 2004 to 165 during the week of Oct. 7...
Iraq's ethnic groups are taking matters into their own hands and battling each other. The Iraqi security forces have come a long way in the past two years, but American officials say that only one battalion is ready to operate independently. And many units are manned largely by Shiite troops, some of whom are bent on revenge against the Sunni minority, which had dominated Iraq under Saddam, a fellow Sunni.
In the north, the Kurdish peshmerga militia is the main security force. Throughout the south, radical cleric Muqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army and the Iranian-backed Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq's Badr Organization are fighting province by province for control of the streets. The Baghdad government and official forces are almost irrelevant.
The administration always touts the "growing" Iraqi presence with regards to security. It would appear that the Iraqi military, is now a vehicle for ethnic self interest, with no sense of nationalism at all. So, the Iraqi forces may exasperbate the tensions, instead of demonstrating unity. The national government has no tenticles of control, local militias with narrow interests are in power and this only entrenches ethnic tensions.
You see all the various factors at play and it becomes obvious that we are not witnessing the birth of a new nation, but a slow burn towards civil war. Our involvement has contributed to this current predicament and our involvement can no longer salvage it. Withdrawal of American troops could possibly excelerate the march to war, but clearly it moves with or without us. Maybe it is better for all involved if we get out and let events unfold sooner rather than later. I don't see a way out of this situation, violence is inevitable and many of us always knew that Iraq was a country in name only, despite the propaganda of this administration.