"The flaw that we've had in Iraq from day one is that we've been ostrichlike with our dealings in our reality on the ground in the country. At each stage of the process, the administration has been in denial about what's going on." - Peter Galbraith
It's ironic that conservatives have spent the last 20 years or so whining endlessly about "political correctness", by which they meant things that they thought were politically INcorrect. It was always confusing to me. But with arrival of the postmodern Bush administration and the ascendency of Republican State TV (FOX News), they've become more obsessive than anyone about political labelling of darn near everything.
Like the comma-dancing over whether Iraq is in a "civil war", or whether they "went to the brink and pulled back", or whatever. Bush and Deadeye Dick are supposed to undertake a new push this week to win hearts and minds on the home front for their disastrous war policies in Iraq. They'll make more lying promises and lie all over the place about what's going on. Maybe if they do a good job, the ever-shrinking minority who believes in their way will shrink a little more slowly for a couple of weeks.
There are several interesting things about Badkhen's piece. It's interesting, for example, to see that Larry Diamond, who has been so critical of the Bush's adminstration's failures in Iraq, still has no other alternative to offer than to "stay the course", only do it more competently.
Heavily armed private militias routinely clash; suicide bombers kill civilians every day; each side sets fire to the other's mosques, expels families from their homes, and slaughters each other; and the central government seems powerless to stop the violence. ...
The latest upsurge in Iraqi bloodshed, the conventional wisdom goes, has pushed the country to "the brink" of civil war.
It's interesting to see what Badhken calls the "conventional wisdom", a phrase incidentally which was made part of the everyday vocabulary by the famous book The Affluent Society by Peter Galbraith's father, John Kenneth Galbraith. What she cites as "conventional wisdom" is the official administration line. Actually, the polls have shown that the general public is much more likely to view what is going on as a civil war. (The opening quote of this post from Galbraith is also from her article)
But to many analysts, Iraq is already immersed in a civil war. Some point to the hypothetical definition of a civil war recently offered by National Director of Intelligence John Negroponte as "a complete loss of central government security control, the disintegration or deterioration of the security forces of the country."
"In academic terms, this is a civil war, and it's not even a small one," said Larry Diamond, a former consultant to the provisional authority in Baghdad who is now critical of the Bush administration's policies in Iraq.
"I don't know how else you would describe something which has people from one community systematically attacking the other," said Peter Galbraith, a former U.S. ambassador to Croatia during the civil war in the Balkans during the Clinton administration and who helped negotiate an end to the conflict in Croatia. "Sunni Arab insurgents have been attacking Shiite clergy, politicians and ordinary Shiites for simply being who they are ... and then you have a response, from the Shiites."
The implications of what to call the violence reach beyond semantics, say analysts who believe civil war is already a reality. Until the United States faces up to the true situation on the ground, it cannot take the necessary steps that might help mitigate the deteriorating situation.
Badhken gives a recent historical perspective on the concept of an Iraqi civil war that is definitely not a "conventional wisdom" account:
Indicators that Iraq was descending into civil war appeared soon after the United States invaded in March 2003. In northern Iraq, on the first day after the fall of Saddam Hussein's regime, Kurdish peshmerga fighters -- repressed, slaughtered and displaced by Hussein - started a bloody retaliation campaign against Arabs and Turkomans, many of whom had moved into historically Kurdish areas.
In southern Iraq, Shiite militias loyal to different political groups and clerics have long been battling each other.
In central, western and north-central Iraq, a Sunni-driven insurgency killed and terrorized not just coalition troops but also Iraq's Shiites and Sunnis who "collaborated" with American troops or the U.S.-backed Iraqi forces.
Estimates of the number of Iraqis killed since the fall of Hussein's regime run as high as 75,000. Iraqi government officials have said at least two-thirds of the victims are civilian casualties of violence inflicted by Iraqi militants.
But after the U.S.-backed provisional authority passed the reins of power to a temporary government dominated by a coalition of Shiite religious parties in January 2005, the violence became reciprocal.
Remember all those reassurances from our infallible generals and the Bush administration that there were only four provinces where the violence was going on, you know, mostly in the "Sunni triangle"? Badhken's account will not be a complete surprise to people who have followed the Iraq news more closely, e.g., by reading Juan Cole's blog regularly. But it doesn't fit well with what the official line has been all along, which was clearly bogus.
