Responsibility for killing in Iraq
Charles Krauthammer:
But Krauthammers large point about blaming America for the strife is absolutely correct. For one thing it gives us more power than we possess and for another it is not what we desire or have attempted to accomplish. It is an attempt to shift responsibvility away from the guilty toward opposition political targets.
This week the internecine warfare in Iraq, already bewildering -- Sunni vs. Shiite, Kurd vs. Arab, jihadist vs. infidel, with various Iranians, Syrians and assorted freelancers thrown into the maelstrom -- went bizarre. In one of the biggest battles of the war, Iraqi troops reinforced by Americans wiped out a heavily armed, well-entrenched millenarian Shiite sect preparing to take over Najaf, kill the moderate Shiite clergy (including Grand Ayatollah Sistani) and proclaim its leader the returned messiah.I still question the characterization of the conflict as civil war, because none of the killings has as its purpose an attempt to seize the machinery of government and to the extent that it might, none of the participants has the capacity to seize the government. As the Taheri piece points out below things in Iraq do not fit neatly into any civil war scenario. The Washington Times editorial today also takes on the civil war cop out of some politicians in Washington.
The battle was a success -- 263 extremists killed, 502 captured. But the sight of the U.S. caught within a Shiite-Shiite fight within the larger Shiite-Sunni civil war can only lead to further discouragement of Americans, already deeply dismayed at the notion of being caught in the middle of endless civil strife.
There are of course many reasons for these schisms. Some, like the fundamental division between Sunni and Shiite, are ancient. Some of the wounds are more contemporary, most notably the social devastation and political ruin brought upon the country by 30 years of Saddamist totalitarianism and its particularly sadistic persecution of Shiites and Kurds.
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Iraqis were given their freedom and yet many have chosen civil war. Among all these religious prejudices, ancient wounds, social resentments and tribal antagonisms, who gets the blame for the rivers of blood? You can always count on some to find the blame in America. "We did not give them a republic,'' insists Newsweek's Fareed Zakaria. "We gave them a civil war.''
Of all the accounts of the current situation, this is by far the most stupid. And the most pernicious. Did Britain "give'' India the Hindu-Muslim war of 1947-48 that killed a million souls and ethnically cleansed 12 million more? The Jewish-Arab wars in Palestine? The tribal wars of post-colonial Uganda?
We gave them a civil war? Why? Because we failed to prevent it? Do the police in America have on their hands the blood of the 16,000 murders they failed to prevent last year?
...We have made a lot of mistakes in Iraq. But when Arabs kill Arabs and Shiites kill Shiites and Sunnis kill all in a spasm of violence that is blind and furious and has roots in hatreds born long before America was even a republic, to place the blame on the one player, the one country, the one military that has done more than any other to try to separate the combatants and bring conciliation is simply perverse.
It infantilizes Arabs. It demonizes Americans. It willfully overlooks the plainest of facts: Iraq is their country. We midwifed their freedom. They chose civil war.
But Krauthammers large point about blaming America for the strife is absolutely correct. For one thing it gives us more power than we possess and for another it is not what we desire or have attempted to accomplish. It is an attempt to shift responsibvility away from the guilty toward opposition political targets.
(I had trouble posting my comment before:)
ReplyDeleteKrauthammer is attacking a half-truth. Yes, the bad actors in Iraq are to blame for the murders and mayhem they support and commit. But the Bush administration should have seen this coming: though they are not to blame for not stopping the violence, as you often point out, they *are* to blame for putting U.S. soldiers and money into what was easily predicted to be the meat-grinder that it is. As my grandpa, a very proud WW2 Marine, would say, red-faced: "Why is Bush sending our troops over there, we can't change those people!" Indeed, the travesty of our foreign policy is that it is more about helping others than defending ourselves; it is not selfish, but self-sacrificial. We are getting the exact recompense caused by Bush's philosophy, a philosophy which marginalizes the life and liberty of U.S. citizens.