Redstate

is civil war really unthinkable?

By streiff Posted in War — Comments (18) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »

The conventional wisdom informs us that a civil war in Iraq spells failure for our efforts there and would require a withdrawal of US troops.

Leaving aside for the moment a discussion of whether or not a civil war is underway as we speak, I’d contend that if there is a civil war in Iraq it is between SCIRI and Jaish al-Mahdi because the Sunni and al-Qaeda have neither established an alternative government nor declared independence, what effect does a civil war truly have on our ability to prevail in Iraq?

Read on.

This argument is usually presented as a statement of fact, like this from Chuck Hagel:

How is it going to make things better for us to continue to kill Americans and put Americans in the middle of a civil war that we have less and less control and influence over every day? How does that stabilize things?

One could equally ask how does leaving Iraq in the throes of a civil war and giving up the control that we might have stabilize things, but that would presume second order reasoning and would be the subject of another essay.

Let’s examine the parts of this one by one.

In the middle of a civil war?

There is no evidence that any of the parties are anticipating an uprising against US forces like the 1920 Uprising against Britain. To the contrary, at this point it seems as though US troops are viewed as the honest brokers by Iraqis. US forces in Iraq during a civil war would probably see the byproduct of that war, refugees, etc., but not necessarily be directly affected by it. (As an aside, I am aware that the plural of anecdote is not data and that the last link is proof of nothing more than the experience of the writer, it is presented as an exemplar of many such accounts I have read.)

If we decided to let the Iraqis fight it out without interfering we certainly have the ability to move our troops to large bases in remote areas and wait it out.

Less and less control?

Actually, our control would be enhanced by remaining in Iraq during a civil war. As noted above, even now the various factions rely upon the good offices of American power to negotiate equitable solutions. During a civil war the presence of American troops would militate against slaughter and could probably go a long way to ensuring that the fighting is kept confined to a relatively small bit of geography.

So while Hagel does an admirable job of scaremongering I really have a great deal of difficulty understanding how Iraq today or Iraq a year ago differs from Iraq in a civil war.

But what would it really mean?

There is no doubt that a full blown civil war in Iraq would be nasty. For Iraqis in neighborhoods that were mixed ethnically or politically it could be very ugly. CNN and the Reuters photoshop crew would have a field day recording atrocities. While the human tragedy could, in a worse case scenario, approach statistical levels what would that mean for us?

Many observers of the war have offered the critique that one of the underlying causes of the insurgency is the fact that the defeat suffered by the Iraqi army was not sufficiently violent and left the Sunni minority feeling as though they had been betrayed or cheated rather than beaten. Sort of a Middle Eastern version of the feeling in Weimar Germany.

When one looks at civil wars, one finds that they were often the only way to settle intractable political differences. The English Civil War, our own, the Irish Civil War, the Biafran secession, etc., were all brought on by differences which the opposing sides could not bridge politically. The war settled the issue and most everyone moved on.

A Sunni-Shi’a civil war would settle Sunni claims to a share of power and oil wealth for all time. Syria’s ability to meddle would be crimped. There could be a reenactment of India after Partition with large numbers of Sunni decamping for Syria and Saudi Arabia.

No one likes to see people rendered homeless but if the Sunni will not act as a community to expel al Qaeda and neutralize the insurgency there one is hard pressed to explain why the Shi’a should be expected to tolerate daily car bombing in their towns and markets. Below, for instance, is what the Krajina looked like in the aftermath of the Croatian offensive there in 1995.

From an humanitarian standpoint one really has to question whether Iraqi civilians would be hit harder by becoming internal or external refugees or by enduring the daily bombings and rampaging death squads that political and sectarian conflict have fostered.

As a side benefit, we’d get to see if a large influx of Sunni refugees would indeed destabilize Syria.

But if the civil war is not an ethnic pogrom writ large but really a war between the nascent Iraqi government and those areas, both Ba’ath loyalists and al Qaeda, which resist the government’s power, then the level of refugees could be small indeed.

In my view, the inevitable civil war involves a settling of accounts with Moqtada al-Sadr’s Jaish al Mahdi either unilaterally or by using the Iraqi army or the Badr brigades. The one thing striking about the discussion on a civil war in Iraq is the way in which suppressing JaM is mentioned as an item on a checklist rather that the Iraqi equivalent of a cannon fired from Fort Sumter.

We shouldn’t deceive ourselves. If the al Maliki government cracks down on the JaM we have a civil war in Iraq. If we strike at JaM we will precipitate what will for all intents and purposes be a civil war.

What should we do?

When I was a young lieutenant assigned to a rifle platoon in Germany at the nadir of the volunteer Army I had the privilege of watching two rifle companies engage in a nighttime brawl in a cantonment area at the Grafenwoehr training area. Our battalion operations officer, a major and old enough to know better, was consumed by a sense of duty and immortality and decided to wade into the hooking and gouging morass created by some two hundred raging infantrymen and break up the fight by a combination of rank and force of personality. It was not among the one or two best decisions he’d ever made.

If we try to act as a traffic cop in a civil war in Iraq, regardless of the number or nature of the parties, we will suffer the same fate as my operations officer did. We will get out butt stomped. Cops learn early on that the most dangerous situation for a patrol officer is responding to a domestic dispute. We need to keep that thought foremost in our minds if things unravel.

We have three options in the case of a civil war:

• Evacuation. We know what that looks like, Barry McCaffrey created the verbal picture in his op-ed.
• Neutrality. Withdraw US troops to large bases removed from highly populated areas and limit its combat operations to convoy and route security and local defense. This, in my view, is the worst option. It paints us as weak and unreliable and the winner owes us nothing.
• Choose sides.

Choosing sides, in my view, beats all other alternatives hands down. We increase our influence. We are able to reduce the number of casualties. Unlike neutrality, we get to ensure our choice wins.

Ralph Peters gets it mostly right. In a throw down between Shi’a and Sunni we need to back the Shi’a. In the case of a split in the government, we need to do right by Moqtada al-Sadr this time around.

None of this is to say civil war is a desirable outcome. It isn’t. The level of violence in Iraq is unacceptably high but there remains hope that all sides will back away from the abyss and find true accommodation. The hope is slim given the frayed nature of the Iraqi social fabric but it is still there.

But if bad comes to worse and something generally acknowledged as a civil war breaks that does not necessarily end our involvement in Iraq. We need to intervene quickly and forcefully on the side of the legitimate government of Iraq to bring the war to a close rapidly and on acceptable terms, strengthening our hand in Iraq and in that region.