Civil War in Iraq

Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld told Congress today that despite a surge in sectarian violence in Iraq, the process of creating a stable government is proceeding satisfactorily. Rumsfeld was pressed to explain the U.S. military's plan to respond in the event that Iraq's sectarian violence grows into a full-fledged civil war. He said:

The plan is to prevent a civil war, and to the extent one were to occur, to have the — from a security standpoint — have the Iraqi security forces deal with it, to the extent they are able to.

“To the extent one were to occur”? Are these people living in a dream world? Maybe pre-war intelligence was vague and serves as an excuse for the terrible judgments made in bringing us into war and then failing to administer it in a way that would have avoided our current predicament. But we’ve been there for three years and ought to have a realistic view of what is happening in that country - and that is, at best, that the US military presence is the only buffer between an all-out Shia/Sunni civil war. It must be so ingrained after five years now that the Administration cannot bear to level with the American public but insists on painting a rosy picture to cover their actions or to justify their decisions later this year..

Robert F. Kaplan, writing in The New Republic on March 6, 2006 describes what is actually happening in Iraq. A few quotes give the flavor:

Not everything the U.S. enterprise touches here turns to gold. But everything it lets go of does seem to turn into dirt. With U.S. reconstruction aid running out, Iraq's infrastructure, never fully restored to begin with, decays by the hour. Iraq's political arena, from which the Americans had no choice but to withdraw, has dissolved into something unrecognizable, carved up for sectarian advantage and without a center to keep its parts from spinning away. The insurgency continues to rage. Iraq's security forces still cannot operate on their own. And, as what was once a largely one-sided Sunni campaign of terrorism rapidly approaches something like parity (with the Shia taking up arms in their own defense), the likelihood of a civil war has surged.

As the war takes a sectarian turn, the United States begins to look, even to many Iraqis, like an honest broker, more peacekeeper than belligerent. Sheik Humam Hamoudi, one of Iraq's most powerful Shia and a leader of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), knows this better than most. And, although he complains that the Americans have placed undue restraints on the Shia-dominated security forces, he likens the effect of a U.S. withdrawal from Iraq to "a child when he wants to walk and you ask him to play football." Absent the Americans, he says, Baghdad would be transformed into another Beirut.

Hundreds of miles to the west, in an Arabesque villa that rises out of the desert near the Syrian border, Sheik Abdullah Al Yawar--Hamoudi's mirror image in the Sunni community--echoes his concern. He worries that the same Iraqi security forces that Hamoudi claims the United States has muzzled operate with too little American oversight. He claims they have been running amok through his province, beating and arresting his constituents and chanting Shia slogans. "If the Americans leave," he warns, "there will be rivers of blood." In their own way, then, both sheiks see the U.S. military presence for exactly what it has become: a buffer--between Iraq's sects and between relative order and complete mayhem.

According to a U.S. Government Accountability Office report published earlier this month, an interagency group of State Department, military, and contracting officials concluded that "critical infrastructure facilities constructed or rehabilitated under U.S. funding have failed, will fail, or will operate in sub-optimized conditions following handover to the Iraqis." Absent U.S. oversight, politicians from competing sects have transformed the ministries into personal fiefdoms.

If civil war comes to Iraq, it may be ignited as much by the [police] as by the insurgents. For Iraq's police are, to an extent not fully grasped in Washington, not police at all. As one of his parting acts in June 2004, CPA chief L. Paul Bremer signed Order 91, outlawing militias in Iraq. In response, thousands of Shia militiamen exchanged their street clothes for police uniforms. As they have gotten better at combating Iraq's Sunni guerrillas, the insurgency, at least in Baghdad and its southern outskirts, has weakened, with attacks declining since last fall. The only problem is that brutality is one of the tactics that achieved these results.

The Interior Ministry's extrajudicial antics first came to light last November, when U.S. troops stumbled across a torture chamber in Baghdad operated by Interior police. Every week brings more handcuffed and decomposed bodies discovered in garbage dumps, rivers, and hastily dug pits. "Scores of individuals are regularly detained in the middle of the night and without judicial warrant," a recent report by the U.N. Assistance Mission for Iraq says. "The rule of law continues to be challenged by the existence of militias and other groups who continue to act with impunity, confirming an urgent need for the State to assert control over its security forces." But these forces were never the state's to begin with. Unlike the Iraqi army, which operates in tandem with U.S. forces, the police recruit and operate locally, and, until recently, they did so largely free of U.S. supervision.

Just as the Americans create a buffer for Iraq's Shia by training and equipping their security forces to combat the insurgency, they're also building a buffer for Iraq's Sunnis, who increasingly rely on the U.S. military to keep those same forces in check. In areas like Salman Pak and Tall Afar, the once viscerally anti-American Sunni population has even turned to the Americans for protection.

At a base in central Iraq a few days earlier, two U.S. helicopters taxi to a halt near a C-130. The crew chiefs jump out and guide two rows of detainees, handcuffed and blindfolded, away from the prop blast. A detainee's fate, as I learned last year on stumbling across a similar scene in Baghdad, depends largely on his destination. The idea of prisoners begging to get into Abu Ghraib may seem like a stretch, but, more than anything else, they fear being turned over to the Iraqi security forces. They know the Americans probably won't kill them, and that, in all likelihood, they will be released in a few days.

The administration intends to draw down troop levels to 100,000 by the end of the year, with the pullback already well underway as U.S. forces surrender large swaths of the countryside and hunker down in their bases. The plan infuriates many officers, who can only say privately what noncommissioned officers say openly. "In order to fix the situation here," Sabre Squadron's Sergeant José Chavez says, "we need at least 180,000 troops." Iraq, however, will soon have about half that. An effective counterinsurgency strategy may require time and patience. But the war's architects have run out of both.