U.S. should stay out of Iraq civil war

Any strategy of withdrawal in Iraq should address objectives of
the current administration’s policies in Iraq, such as
encouraging the spread of democracy, and taking the fight to the
terrorists so that we don’t have to fight them on our own
soil.

On Aug. 30, President Bush told thousands of soldiers, Marines
and World War II veterans at North Island Naval Station that
“we will stay on the offensive” in Iraq.

An analysis of the military and political environment of Iraq
does not support our president’s idea that our country is
fighting on the offensive front-line of a global Islamic
insurgency. The idea of a front in military terms implies the
meeting place where two national armies clash, but insurgents are
most often not directly affiliated with nation-states; and, as a
consequence, their resources are limited in comparison with state
militaries.

Thus, the method of warfare left to them is atypical or
guerrilla warfare. They attack (using “hit-and-run”
tactics or “hit and die” like suicide bombers) wherever
they can with their limited resources. The objective of an
insurgency is to be as invisible as possible, and spend the
necessary years that it will take to slowly wear down or wear out a
superior power, and not to fight a head-on, front-line type of
war.

In Iraq, however, we see that there is not just an insurgency
against a superior, occupying power, but a plethora of
execution-style ethnic slaughters and mass-murder suicide bombings.
The attack on the Shiite mosque Khadimiya that led to the stampede
deaths of 640 Shiites, shows that the country is indeed sliding
into a Sunni vs. Shiite civil war. There have also been significant
ethnic attacks against the Kurds as well.

If we pull out of Iraq, it is likely that the country will fall
into a civil war. So, a supporter of the current policy might say
we have a responsibility to ensure that does not happen.

But it is impossible to stop a civil war from happening if the
two intransigents will not budge from their mutually hostile
positions, and that is exactly what we’ve been seeing in the
attempts to draft the Iraqi constitution recently. The Sunnis
oppose federalism. The Shiites support it (except for Moqtada
al-Sadr), and this issue is directly related to the Sunni dominance
in the Saddam era, and the scarcity of oil and gas resources in
Sunni central and western areas of the country.

Federalism in Iraq would put the vast oil wealth of Iraq’s
south under Shiite regional hegemony, and the energy resources of
areas of the north such as the oil-rich city of Kirkuk under the
regional authority of the Kurds, both effectively excluding the
Sunnis from the massive oil revenues of these regions. The recent
drafting shows that all three groups refuse to change their
fundamental attitudes towards federalism. This means that the civil
conflict will inevitably continue alongside the insurgency against
the U.S.-led occupation.

If we leave, the insurgency ends, and the civil war will be
likely to continue. However, Iraq will not be any kind of
“real-threat” breeding ground for terrorists until the
issue of domestic hegemony is resolved by whoever emerges as victor
from what would likely be a disastrous and mutually exhausting
civil war.

In the meantime, our country can continue to watch events on the
ground as they unfold, adjusting policy as need be; give our
soldiers a much-needed rest from the mental and physical stress of
live combat and life in a war zone; use our much-needed tax dollars
now being spent on endlessly depletive military operations to
repair war-damaged equipment, expand our existing military arsenal
as well as the domestic defensive infrastructure, provide for the
ongoing training and recruitment of our troops, and make
improvements in the protective armor for both soldiers and combat
vehicles. Also, we could step up the hunt for Osama bin Laden and
operations against al-Qaeda.

As for spreading democracy, it is clear that the more relevant
military and political opposition in Iraq is Shiite vs. Sunni or
Sunni vs. Shiite/Kurd, and not democracy vs. tyranny.

In addition, there is an argument that democracy will give the
people what they wish. In this circumstance it would appear that
the people want to fight. Well let’s let them fight, and
let’s get our troops and our billions of tax dollars out of
the way. It is not our business to decide the political question
between Shiites and Sunnis. This opposition is centuries old. We
can offer help, but we are not obligated to destroy ourselves in
the process of doing so.

That there is a civil war growing in Iraq is not in question.
The question Americans and U.S. policy-makers should concern
themselves with is whether we want our soldiers to be caught in the
cross-fire, while at the same time stoking the flames of global
anti-American Islamic hate with our continuing presence.

Northcott is a UCLA Extension student.