Understanding the Civil War in Iraq Posted by Michael Signer

Even those of us who are reasonably well-informed and paying close attention to Iraq are desperately in need of facts -- those boring things -- to help make sense of the maddening Chinese water torture rhythm of violence there.

But in trying to figure out what's actually going on inside Iraq, it is almost impossibly difficult to wade through the surges of rhetoric from both sides (the right's idealism, the left's pessimism).  There's a fog of war on both sides.

We can finally get a few answers in a searching, thoughtful, and thoroughly chilling interview with Nir Rosen in Foreign Policy (and it's a Web exclusive, so anyone can read it).

Instead of engaging in the meta-debate of who's-right-who's-wrong-in-America, Rosen just plainly tells us what's going on in Iraq on the ground.  For starters, the violence against Americans is only incidentally against America -- a civil war really has started inside the country, and it's just on low burn now.  As Rosen writes:

There’s been a civil war in Iraq since 2004. It’s on a low scale, and nobody has really been paying attention because it’s happening at night, away from where the journalists are. The casualty numbers are still fairly low, but they’ve been steadily increasing. In the north, immediately after the war, the Kurds emptied a lot of areas of non-Kurds, and Arabs have “ethnically cleansed” some areas of Kurds. So it’s been reciprocal. In the south, soon after the war started, Shiites were taking over Sunni mosques. In Baghdad, Shiites and Sunnis attacked each other’s clerics and mosques starting in 2004. In Sunni-majority neighborhoods, they drove out Shiites with threats and killings. There were population exchanges basically. It was sort of like “Bosnia light.”

Militias are getting stronger and stronger. Hatred is growing between Sunnis and Shiites. To Sunnis, all Shiites are Iranian. To Shiites, all Sunnis are Baathists, Saddamists or Wahabbis. Iraq is now not just in a civil war, it’s practically a regional war, because you have Iran strongly supporting the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution, and Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and individuals from Syria supporting the Sunnis because they’re terrified of a Shiite-dominated Iraq. And as the civil war in Iraq escalates, you’re going to find that the nation-state concept is sort of irrelevant. If a Sunni tribe is attacked in Iraq and they have relatives in Jordan, Syria, or Saudi Arabia, as many do, those tribal relatives are going to come in at a certain point, too, and it’s going to draw in the whole region.

The essential dynamic is an embattled minority with an extaordinary amount of esprit d'corps taking on the majority, and drawing on a history of aggrievement as fuel for the fight.  Anything that reinforces the Sunnis' resentment of the majority Shiites -- or even allows that resentment to exist -- increases the conflict, and draws in surrounding parties. 

Too many Americans also fail to understand the deep interconnection of Iran and Iraq.  Rosen says:

I’m not the first one to say this, but Iran is the big winner in all of this. The United States has no leverage over Iran at this point. If the United States were to strike Iran, Iran could simply support the Shiites in Iraq. And if the Iraqi Shiites start attacking U.S. and British forces en masse, it will make the Sunni insurgency look like child’s play.

I'm not sure if I agree with this, but I guess it depends on what "this" means in his first sentence.  I mean, I guess you could argue that Iran will be a winner if Iraq utterly breaks down into civil war, because then the United States will be in a Hobson's choice, weaker no matter what it does.  But this puts the cart considerably before the horse.  No matter how wily Iran is, they can't be focused on the secondary benefits that will result from having (another) active engagement with the Sunnis.  Iran understandably would want to avoid getting there, which might explain the news that Iran wants to meet with the U.S. for the purpose of discussing Iraq.

The most interesting thought comes at the end of the interview, in response to the question, "Christopher Hitchens has proposed a “Nixon goes to China” approach to Iran. What do you think of this idea?

I think that’s probably the first intelligent thing I’ve heard Hitchens say in the past five years. I think that’s very important. Had this happened earlier, perhaps Mahmoud Ahmadinejad would have not won the elections. The Iranians have been speaking about a dialogue of civilizations for a long time, and Washington has responded only with threats and enmity, really. I think increased business ties would certainly strengthen the U.S.-Iranian relations. I don’t think there’s any reason for the United States and Iran to be enemies, apart from the Iranian-Israeli hostility. I think they are natural allies. It’s about time Washington made an overture to Iran. We certainly don’t want to miss the boat and let the Europeans make inroads economically in Iran, a market the United States needs. The Iranian people have no inherent hostility toward the United States. I think such a move would work.

I wonder also whether we should take a "Nixon goes to China" approach to both the Sunnis and Shiites as well.  I guess we've probably totally abdicated our role as honest broker through our belligerent policy there.  But if there's a way to salvage our role, and do whatever we can to invest the warring parties in the legitimate political process, that seems to be the most pressing task right now.  In other words, we need our discussion here at home to shift from Iraq's effects here domestically to what we're actually doing there to forward regional progress -- or at least stop the region from collapsing.

Comments

[Sijui]

Thank you for this moderate, common sense and INFORMED analysis of what's going on there!!!! I find it absolutely maddening and nauseating, the extreme ignorance and misinformation that pervades the American body politic. No citizen of this country has the excuse for complacency and ignorance, especially resigning themselves to getting all their facts and information from the mainstream media sources especially in these times of acute intellectual laziness and sound bite journalism. Read, inquire, research! This is the least any citizen should do especially in keeping with the SUPPORT THE TROOPS MANTRA! KNOW WHAT YOUR SONS AND DAUGHTERS ARE DYING FOR! KNOW WHAT LEGACY YOU'RE LEAVING FOR YOUR CHILDREN!
Back to the issue at hand, I find it incredulous why anyone would expect the Iraqi factions to be suddenly magnanimous and benevolent in nation building. What in their history alludes to this pre-disposition? Anyone looking at the cold, hard facts of historical progression for this nation state, cannot miss understanding the latent sectarianism that underpins the very foundation of this society. Why is anyone surprised now that it is following its natural course?
The global community must sit back and accept the bloodletting. Iraqis have amongst themselves blood feuds, rivalries and resentments dating back millenia, let them sort them out within the confines of their indigenous institutions i.e. clan, sect and regional allegiances, without external interference. This is the only way to attain voluntary social cohesion and consensus short of forcing social engineering and dialogue which is what the Americans, the British colonialists before them and other pseudo-imperialists since time in memorial, have tried and failed.

[Jeff Younger]

The global community must sit back and accept the bloodletting. Iraqis have amongst themselves blood feuds, rivalries and resentments dating back millenia, let them sort them out within the confines of their indigenous institutions i.e. clan, sect and regional allegiances, without external interference. This is the only way to attain voluntary social cohesion and consensus short of forcing social engineering and dialogue which is what the Americans, the British colonialists before them and other pseudo-imperialists since time in memorial, have tried and failed.

I agree. Arabia is still composed of "big man" societies within state borders drawn by Europeans. War is the traditional means of diplomacy among Arab societies. It is very likely that a big-"big man" will emerge in Iraq, and a relative peace will follow. Of course, the US would like a friendly big-"big man," but that is another story.

[doc]

...i find it interesting that DA is paying attention to Rosen now: his earlier piece in The Atlantic (stating much the same case as he did in FP) evinced not even a yawn, much less a rebuttal, on these pages.

[groy]

As far as Iraq goes 'civil' war has been ongoing since Iraq was created, and a thousand years before that!

This is not necessary a bad thing and while few admit it, when radicals kill each other they both lose.

[Dan Kervick]

But in trying to figure out what's actually going on inside Iraq, it is almost impossibly difficult to wade through the surges of rhetoric from both sides (the right's idealism, the left's pessimism). There's a fog of war on both sides.

Certainly the rhetoric is a big part of the difficulty. But I think a much more important factor is that Iraq is just so dangerous that few reporters can actually get out into the country, away from handlers and fixers, to get any clear sense of what is going on. The reports from the Iraq are absurdly top heavy with information about the political goings on inside the Green Zone, when most of the real power that is determining the future of the country lies beyond those walls.

Nir Rosen is one of very few reporters who did anything beyond the most superficial reporting on the situation inside Fallujah in 2004. And it's not surprising - any Western reporter who ventures outside the protective bubble is likely to end up kidnapped, shot up in the crossfire, or assassinated. And while we all know that there is a Sunni insurgency, and can name two or three of the main Sunni parties or organizations, the details of the rivalries, the competing agendas, the shifting alliances, and the short and long term strategic aims, remain quite mysterious and the subject of conjecture even by experts. That really is somewhat unusual, it seems to me. Generally in a war like this the various "rebel" groups issue endless streams of manifestos explaining their aims.

On the other hand, maybe there are endless streams of manifestos, but there are so few Arabic readers among the press corps that most of them fall from the presses unnoticed by Western reporters. Or maybe our reporters are so deeply embedded with our military forces that they are incapable of developing the level of trust needed to set up the clandestine communications networks of sources that would be needed to get a lot of information from the fighters in the field. Also, many of the reporters from the region who do speak Arabic and have a deep familiarity with Iraq, and the ability to mingle with the local population unnoticed, were chased out by the coalition early in the war.

Another factor, perhaps, is that many of the most significant figures, such as Sadr, Hakim and Sistani, seem to have little interest in communicating with the Western media. Unlike the case of post-colonial wars of national liberation, in which rebel forces often made strenuous efforts to win the hearts and minds of Western audiences, one senses that most of the major figures in Iraq couldn't care less about Americans or Brits think. They know the Americans will eventually be gone, and they don't regard them as king-makers that need to be drawn to their side.

[Dan Kervick]

I agree. Arabia is still composed of "big man" societies within state borders drawn by Europeans. War is the traditional means of diplomacy among Arab societies. It is very likely that a big-"big man" will emerge in Iraq, and a relative peace will follow. Of course, the US would like a friendly big-"big man," but that is another story.

It's becoming more and more difficult to avoid the comic dimensions of this latest dark blotch on a much-spotted human history.

We already had a big man in Iraq. Somehow through miscalculation on our part, or miscalculation on his part, he invaded Kuwait. That initiated a whole bizarre series of events contributing to an increasingly desperate and vanity-driven 12-year effort to defeat one man, to empower his main rivals in Iraq to challenge his rule, and to dismember the Iraqi state. We helped by enforcing no-fly zones that limited the regime's ability to re-establish sovereign control in Iraq, by funding covert actions aimed at destabilization and regime change, by starving his people in order to loosen his grip on them, and by preventing the regime from re-constituting its military power. Not surprisingly, he fought back against these rivals with extreme ruthlessness, even as he retreated from his own country inside an increasingly paranoid and insane shell of delusion. He is now on trial for his ruthlessness - although "trial" seems a bit of a stretch for the absurdist comedy now being staged in Iraq with Saddam as main character.

Eventually, the Iraqi state was dismembered, with a final push from the US - although with strategic motives that are probably mysterious even to some who did the pushing. Some profess shock now that the state we dismembered is not magically reconstituting itself. Even better, some of the people who were most in favor of the invasion, and expressed the most extreme confidence in our ability to remake Iraq in our desired image, now claim that the dismemberment was actually their clever, secret plan all along.

So eventually, we now hear, Iraq will get another strong man, and get itself put back together again. The only difference between that new strong man and the old one will be that the old one will be hung and dead, while the new one will be alive and ruling much the same way as his predecessor. The new one will probably have an even more hostile attitude toward the US than the old one, and may very well be a religious fanatic rather than a secular statist.

The whole cycle would be comic, if it weren't for the fact that thousands of American soldiers are dead, injured or wounded, along with a few hundred thousand Iraqis - or maybe millions, who can count? - and their survivors aren't laughing.

The pompous primate lords who brought us this spectacle are still preening, and puffing out there chests, and baring their teeth, and attempting to impress and scare us all with their phony displays of cold and hard-hearted ruthlessness, and their poisonous threats of purges and suppressions - and they keep talking, and talking, and talking, and attacking, and adjusting their plans as they go. They make a lot of noise. But they increasingly look like a mangy pack of jibbering, murderous babboons - scrambling randomly to a fro over the the dessicated plains, gesticulating wildly and vocalizing energetically and biting each other - but communicating in an occult manner that make sense only inside the babboon world.

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