Failure Is Not An Option: Part 1
I read an article by Peter Baker in the Washington Post last week. It was entitled, “Bush’s New Argument: It Could Be Worse.” In it, Mr. Baker writes:
With crucial midterm elections just 2 1/2 months away, Bush and his team are trying to turn the public debate away from whether the Iraq invasion has worked out to what would happen if U.S. troops were withdrawn, as some Democrats advocate. The necessity of not failing, Bush advisers believe, is now a more compelling argument than the likelihood of success.
I want to know why it is necessary that we not “fail.” Even the President, in his latest press conference, said, “The American people have got to understand the consequence of leaving Iraq.” I think he’s right. Before we can genuinely call for our troops to leave Iraq, we have to know what the end result of that process will look like. We have to know what failure means.
According to the President, failure in Iraq is…:
- A civil war between Sunnis and Shi’ites
- Innocent civilians living their lives in fear
- The creation of “a safe-haven for terrorists”
- A message to reformers in the Middle East that the US has “abandoned our desire to change the conditions that create terror.”
- The first domino
- The creation of a more dangerous world
- Chaos in the region
- Telling our troops that they sacrificed for nothing
- A failure to secure our own country
- A sign that “we will have lost our soul as a nation”
Over the next week (not including the holiday), we’re going to go through these one by one. But today, we’ll just cover the first one.
Failure is a civil war between Sunnis and Shi’ites.
There is an excellent cover story in the August 14th issue of TIME, entitled, “Life in Hell: A Baghdad Diary.” The article was written by Aparisim Gosh, TIME’s senior correspondent who has covered Baghdad for the past three and a half years, and I can’t recommend it enough. The subtitle of the story is “As Lebanon rages, Iraq slides into civil war. One man’s view of a land coming apart.” Gosh writes in the story, “In the Red Zone (the name given to the rest of Baghdad by Green Zoners too nervous to venture outside the walls), the sporadic spurts of violence between Shi’ites and Sunnis has given way to a steady stream of blood. Partisans on both sides are arming themselves for battle, and ordinary folks are looking for ways to defend themselves.”
Gosh also tells us about the British ambassador’s letter to London from a couple of weeks back, in which the ambassador wrote, “The prospect of a low intensity civil war and a de facto division of Iraq is probably more likely at this point than a successful and substantial transition to a stable democracy.” Gosh continues, “For ordinary Iraqis…the time to debate if and when a civil war will start is past: it is already under way. It’s a view that I share.”
According to an NPR story, Gosh is not the only one. An Iraqi television station booked two high-ranking clerics, one Sunni and one Shi’ite, to debate whether the country was in the middle of a civil war. But unfortunately for the TV show, there was no debate. Both agreed that Iraq is in the middle of a civil war that started with the mosque bombing in February. The NPR story then points to the mass migration of Iraqis — 182,000 people, according to Iraq’s ministry of displaced persons — all of whom are “being forced to flee because of sectarian violence,” as proof for calling it a civil war.
Meanwhile, the AP reports that “the British deputy to the top U.S. commander in Iraq said the country’s sectarian conflict is not a full-blown civil war but could be described as a ‘civil war in miniature.’” What prevented him from calling it a civil war was the lack of a mass migration, but if we combine that with the NPR story’s 182,000 displaced people, then I think we can start to call the sectarian violence, “civil war.”
If failure in Iraq is a civil war between Sunnis and Shi’ites, then we have already failed.
Come back tomorrow to read “Failure Is Not An Option: Part 2.”