U.S. can't reverse Iraq civil war

by Matthew Chavez

Daily Lobo columnist

After several high-level strategic assessments of the situation in Iraq, the Bush administration stands poised to escalate U.S. military involvement in defiance of the growing domestic and international consensus - including a large majority of Iraqis - favoring withdrawal.

"I'm not going to pull our troops off the battlefield before the mission is complete." President Bush said Tuesday at a news conference.

A brief examination of recent history, however, suggests the administration's plan to escalate U.S. involvement will strengthen the insurgency and encourage the

civil war.

In October in Iraq, 105 U.S. soldiers died - a 21-month high - and 3,709 Iraqis died, the highest civilian toll since the U.S.-led aggression began in 2003, according to a United Nations report released on Nov. 22.

The Iraqi civil war took shape quickly, provoking alarm in Britain, where outgoing Ambassador William Patey warned Prime Minister Tony Blair that "the prospect of a low intensity civil war and a de facto division of Iraq is probably more likely at this stage than a successful and substantial transition to a stable democracy." Even Bush's reduced hopes for a stable government in Baghdad "must remain in doubt," Patey warned.

The Pentagon reacted by launching a two-month offensive described as a final push to secure Iraq's capital and disarm the Shiite militias.

By October, occupation spokesman Maj. Gen. William Caldwell described a "disheartening" two-month operation that produced "a 22 percent increase" in guerrilla attacks and neither secured Baghdad nor achieved "overall expectations of sustaining a reduction in the levels of violence."

"Our presence in such large numbers is encouraging ethnic cleansing and partition," University of Michigan professor and Middle East scholar Juan Cole told the Daily Lobo. "We're not in any significant way stopping that process - it's coming apart underneath us. The level of violence is growing, and the number of provinces where there is such violence is increasing. Now there's an ongoing process of underground ethnic cleansing, and we're not able to do anything about it - we just can't operate at that micro, neighborhood level."

The persistence of Iraq's civil war is largely the outcome of a fundamental miscalculation - the Pentagon's resurrection of the Nixon Doctrine, former President Richard Nixon's Vietnamization program.

Bush's war planners hoped training Iraqi security forces to assume responsibility for the U.S. military's counterinsurgency - Iraqization - would stabilize the country, rendering a large U.S. presence unnecessary. Instead, Iraqization escalated the civil war, deepened the rift between Sunni and Shiite leaders and encouraged the Sunni Arab insurgency.

More than six months ago, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, the foreign policy establishment's leading think tank, warned of the strategic error.

"In a people's war, handing the fighting off to local forces makes sense," observed Stephen Biddle in the council's journal, Foreign Affairs. However, applying this principle in Iraq, he said, "throws gasoline on the fire."

"Iraq's Sunnis perceive the national army and police force as a Shiite-Kurdish militia on steroids," Biddle said. "And they have a point: in a communal conflict, the only effective units are the ones that do not intermingle communal enemies."

Iraqization enabled the extensive infiltration of Shiite militias into Iraq's security forces, providing Shiite leaders the organized and authoritative means to pursue a campaign of expulsion and

massacre against Sunnis, specifically targeting political leaders.

An Iraqi province that was "once considered by American officials to be relatively pacified," the New York Times reports, is now a "cauldron of violence" in which Shiite forces are engaged in a campaign to kill and expel the Sunni community, especially its leaders, reportedly on orders from the U.S.-backed government in Baghdad. Bush, meanwhile, remains unconvinced.

"You hear all the time, well, this may be a civil war," he said to a news conference in early November. "Well, I don't believe it is." On Tuesday, after a week in which hundreds of Iraqis fell to sectarian terrorism, Bush said talk of civil war is "all kinds of speculation."

"Continued U.S. interference in what we publicly term an Iraqi political problem that only Iraqis can resolve can only deepen the distrust and resentment of Iraqis toward the U.S.," retired Col. Daniel Smith, a decorated veteran and senior fellow at the Friends Committee on National Legislation, told the Daily Lobo. "The killings are already systematic, as is the ethnic cleansing."

Evidently, the Pentagon's unsuccessful autumn offensive has failed to dissuade further U.S. involvement. Channeling the disgraced specter of Nixon, the White House remains convinced it can salvage U.S. influence over events to which it has plainly lost its grip.

Matthew Chavez is a political science major with a focus on international relations and a minor in Middle Eastern studies.