Civil war. Surely this is an adjectival misnomer of the first rank. Of all of the various types of war, civil war -- that is, a violent conflict waged between opposing sides within a society -- has generally been the least mannerly and the most savage... By just about every meaningful standard that can be applied -- the reference points of history, the research criteria of political science, the contemporaneous reporting of on-the-ground observers, the grim roll of civilian and combatant casualties -- Iraq is now well into the bloody sequence of civil war. Dispense with the tentative locution "on the verge of." An active, if not full-boil, civil war is already a reality.Shattering Iraq
Having always regarded the practical distinction between Religion and Civil Government as essential to the purity of both, and as guaranteed by the Constitution of the United States, I could not have otherwise discharged my duty on the occasion which presented itself (Letter to Baptist Churches in North Carolina, June 3, 1811).Mixing religion and politics is indeed undemocratic, and unfortunate.
The ever over-confident Bush administration, controlling the levers of authority in the globe's only hyperpower, has never really bothered to understand important characteristics of nations it invades. In its lust for the rhetoric of "spreading democracy," the administration has failed to notice that the term means something different in countries with little democratic experience, such as Afghanistan and Iraq, than it does in the United States. In Iraq, as in Afghanistan, voters cast their ballots as prominent leaders desire. In Afghan elections, people voted as their tribal leaders or warlords directed. In Iraq, most of the majority Shi'a population (60 percent of Iraqis) will reliably vote the way al-Sistani wants. In contrast, American voters-even fundamentalist Christian ones-don't usually vote solely on the basis of their religious leader's political wishes (if they are expressed at all).posted by y2karl at 1:00 PM on December 14, 2005
The Shi'ite religious parties in Iraq, which will most likely be victorious, are heavily influenced and funded by the oppressive theocratic government in Iran. One of the most prominent of those parties, the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, originally consisted of Iraqi defectors, exiles and refugees who spent two decades in Iran during Saddam Hussein's rule and fought on the Iranian side in the Iran-Iraq War during the 1980s. The party's militia, the ruthless Badr organization, has been accused of assassinations and other violence against Sunnis and secular Shi'a. According to foreign policy analyst Gareth Porter, the Dawa party, another Shi'ite group, is organized on the basis of Leninist methods. Shi'ite militias have infiltrated Iraq's security forces and Interior Ministry, which has recently been implicated in the torture of Sunnis in two prisons.
In short, the now desperate Bush administration's attempt to achieve "victory in Iraq" and pledge to take the Iraqi democratic experiment on the road to other autocratic Arab countries really amount to letting U.S. soldiers die to make the world safe for theocracy. In fact, such future theocracies in Iraq and elsewhere would likely be very unfriendly to the United States and might even sponsor terrorist attacks against U.S. targets.
Of course, the "victory" of installing a Shi'ite theocracy in Iraq is predicated on the low probability of the United States defeating the Sunni insurgency and avoiding a civil war, which is already beginning. That internecine war will likely be intensified by the new Iraqi constitution, which barely escaped a Sunni veto in the referendum on October 15.Getting Out of Iraq
Finally, those who accuse the antiwar movement of wanting to "cut and run" and pretend that they care more for the interests of the Iraqis -- whereas most of them are actually worried about U.S. imperial interests -- would be better advised to demand that the U.S. respect Iraqi sovereignty over Iraqi natural resources and reconstruction. For our part, we believe that there is a moral obligation for the U.S. government to pay reparations to the Iraqi people for all that they have suffered as a consequence of U.S. criminal policies -- from the deliberate destruction of Iraq's infrastructure in the 1991 war to the devastation brought by the present invasion and occupation, through the green light given to the Ba'athist regime to crush the mass insurrections of March 1991 and, above all, the murderous embargo inflicted on the Iraqi population from 1991 to 2003.Upon review: Hopeful wishes aside, the forthcoming elections are no grand experiment in democracy. Everything this adminstration has done in Iraq has been ad hoc, improvised and unplanned with the possible unintended consequences never considered.
“I think the debacle in Iraq is the real horrific thing that’s coming down the road. Al-Qaeda is now al-Qaedaism and has really taken hold in other parts of the world. The media, especially American media, is really bore-sighted on Iraq. But if you look at Thailand and the Philippines, the Northern Caucuses, northern Nigeria, militant Islam is really gaining traction. These will be problem areas in the not too distant future.Michael Scheuer
“I also think that the rather sophomoric argument about setting a deadline for the U.S. to pull out of Iraq only makes the enemy strong. I don’t think either party is serious about this. There will be a pull out just in time for the 2006 elections. …
“We still behave as if this were still the terrorism of the Eighties. The terrorism of that era was a lethal nuisance, but it was never a national security threat. The problem, for the U.S. at least is that the possibility of a large attack is a reality and the possibility of another attack is on the horizon.
“What’s going to happen in the United States is that there’s going to be a much larger attack than 9/11 or there will be a kind of nuclear attack with a weapon acquired from the former Soviet Union. The surest sign that neither party in the country takes the possibility of an attack seriously is that we have done nothing to help Russia secure its nuclear weapons.
“I think Iraq is going to be central to the threat for the next decade or more. And, I think we have probably signed the death warrant for Jordan. I think the two attacks we have seen there are just the start of what’s going to happen…
With rare exceptions, that policy of "democratic nation-building" has been unsuccessful in the past; it is unsuccessful today and is almost surely certain to be equally unproductive in the foreseeable future.From an article by Steven A. Peterson and Albert Somit, the co-authors of The Failure of Democratic Nation Building: Ideology Meets Evolution
Viable democracies require the conjunction of very special material and social "enabling conditions" such as an adequate level of economic development, the absence of religious conflict, functioning government institutions and adequate levels of education, among others...
Let us take a look at the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan in terms of the price paid to date by the U.S. -- not only in terms of lives and dollars but in other consequences, such as the deterioration of relations with many of our previous allies, the task of almost single-handedly restoring civil order in a nation reduced to near anarchy, and the bitter divisiveness of that issue here at home.
Consider the price paid by the peoples of the occupied countries -- death and destruction aside, the swift defeat and collapse of the previous regime in Iraq, whatever its horrendous defects, unleashed, possibly even sharpened, long-standing religious rivalries.
These age-old animosities, now refreshed, lessen the prospects of establishing a stable government, let alone anything resembling a democracy. While recent elections in both Afghanistan and Iraq are encouraging, elections by themselves do not ensure the development of stable, functioning democracies...
Let us turn our attention and our resources to resolving the political, social and economic problems that are threatening to undermine our democracy here at home. The way we have gone about nation building has become a bitterly divisive issue, with the contestants angrily questioning not only their opponents' character, judgment and honesty but also their very patriotism. Few things are as potentially dangerous to a democracy as that type of virulent partisanship.
The Pentagon is in the early stages of drafting a wartime request for up to $100 billion more for Iraq and Afghanistan, lawmakers say, a figure that would push spending related to the wars toward a staggering half-trillion dollars.Pentagon to Seek $100 Billion More for War Costs
Reps. Bill Young, R-Fla., the chairman of the House appropriations defense panel, and John Murtha, D-Pa., the senior Democrat on that subcommittee, say the military has informally told them it wants $80 billion to $100 billion in a war-spending package that the White House is expected to send Congress next year.
Asked about the upcoming spending package, Young offered the $80 billion to $100 billion range. "That's what I'm told," he said.
Murtha mentioned the $100 billion figure last week to reporters, saying "Twenty years it's going to take to settle this thing. The American people are not going to put up with it, can't afford it."
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In addition, see also
Cold Mountain
Safe for Theocracy
Ethnicity, Insurgency and Civil War
posted by y2karl at 10:15 AM on December 14, 2005