The Civil War Begins

Isn't it great to have freedom in Iraq? Ah the sound of freedom ringing out not with fireworks, but with gunfire and explosions. The freedom to kidnap and murder. The great gift of democracy we have bestowed upon the people of Iraq that America has bought and paid for with billions in debt, and the lives of young people, has given the Shiites and the Kurds the chance to write a new chapter in the history of the place where civilization was born. Does it make you feel proud?

As the Iraqis begin to take over the tasks of securing the future of the new nation, there is little real news about the chaos that is truly taking place. There are the usual headlines of kidnappings and bombings, but no one in the American press is connecting the dots. Americans assume that the new rash of mayhem is just more of the insurgency, and maybe the least informed of us still believe that we are fighting terrorists. But much of the new carnage is being carried out by the newly elected officials, and the Iraqi forces that we are training and arming. As Iraq takes control of it's own future, the first order of business is a little bit of ethnic cleansing.

Did we inadvertently create the conditions for a civil war, or did we deliberately arm the wrong people to stamp out the insurgency, and along with it, many innocent Sunnis?

Throughout 2005, Bush administration speeches and communications to Congress systematically obscured the fact that the U.S. command was carrying out a battle plan calling for reliance on units filled exclusively, or nearly exclusively, with Shiite and Kurds to occupy Sunni neighborhoods in Baghdad and elsewhere in the "Sunni triangle".

That policy guaranteed the acceleration of already growing tendencies in Iraqi society toward sectarian and ethnic violence -- and possibly toward civil war as well as forms of "ethnic cleansing." Many of the Shiite troops and officers in the military and police commando units of the new Iraqi military are, in fact, motivated by hatred not just of Sunni insurgents but of the Sunni population as a whole. One fine reporter in Iraq, Knight Ridder's Tom Lasseter has, in fact, explored this new Iraqi reality on the ground in ways no other American reporter has thought to do. Last October, he "embedded" himself for a week in a unit of Lt. Gen. Petraeus's new military, the all-Shiite 1st Brigade, the first Iraqi unit to be given its own area of operations and often considered the template for the future of the army. What he discovered was a purely sectarian outfit obsessed with revenge against Sunnis. His is a chilling account of the violent Shiite hatred of Sunnis that drives Iraqi military operations in Sunni neighborhoods and essentially guarantees that the insurgency will only grow fiercer in response.

Our fears of what will happen when the US armed forces leave Iraq are happening today in spite of our presence. The debate about an exit strategy has much greater urgency now than it ever did before as we approach a failed state that is armed to the teeth with American weapons. This creates a grave danger for our meager forces who lack the manpower and the body armor to withstand a fullscale civil war.

If you think that the Iraqi Army will stop fighting when they have eliminated the Sunnis, think again. There are groups that the Iraqis hate more than the Sunnis, and they all wear the uniform of the United States.

Getting out now seems like a good idea to me.