LaOpinion, Sunday March 5, 2006

George A. Lopez

The only trend more tragic than the terrible violence unfolding the past two weeks in Iraq is the ridiculous claim made by the US ambassador there and echoed by President Bush that Iraqis have stared civil war in the eye and rejected it. The obsession with avoiding civil war typifies US misreading of the nature of the violence in Iraq that has characterized this Bush policy debacle.

Since it began nearly three years ago, US leaders have been consistently incorrect about the scope, motivations and actions of the insurgency. In 2003 the Administration announced that insurgent attacks would end after the capture of Saddam; then after the hand-over of authority by the Coalition Provisional Authority to an interim Iraqi government in 2004. Stability would come, we were told, after the pacification of Najaf; or after victory in Fallujah; or after the elections of January, 2005; or with the passage of the constitution in October, 05. Vice-President Cheney declared multiple times in 2005 that the insurgency was in its last dying gasp. Instead, we have more than 500 Iraqis of various political, ethnic and religious identities killed at the hand of their countrymen in the past ten days.

In fact, the Administration may never have had a clear picture of the factional and anarchic violence that Iraq was becoming after our invasion. When the Pentagon was forced by events to admit that the insurgency was more than just the old Baathists fighting until the end for Saddam, the size of the insurgency was reported as being 20,000- 22,000 strong, with about 10% of these being foreign fighters. Now, three years into this conflict, the same insurgency size is reported, while no one does the simple math that would yield the real truth about the scope of Iraqis fighting the US or one another. We know, for example, that somewhere between 8,000 and 10,000 insurgents have been killed. And anywhere from 12 -16,000 Iraqis suspected of some insurgency involvement are held in prisons and detention facilities. How does this not lead to a recalculation of size, scope and meaning of the insurgency?

The persistence of the insurgency into 2005 gave rise to Administration characterization that the rebels were being mobilized and resourced by an alarming increase in foreign fighters. This, of course, occurred as the Administration increased its claim that Iraq had become the primary front in the war on terror. But such podium declarations from Washington gave way to actual assessments by US military in the field. Whether it was from fighting in Fallujah or on the Syrian border, US commanders continued to find that only about 1 in 10 insurgents killed or captured are foreigners.

Such discussions have ignored the changing character of violence in Iraq, which now resembles that of a failed state with varied, factional groups more than it does a civil war. Trying to guard against the latter is ludicrous. In addition to insurgent attacks of the more formal and deadly kind aimed at the US or its perceived allies (the Iraqi police and Iraqi army), there has been a substantial increase in privatized violence conducted by gangs and militia against multiple targets. This ranges from ethnic revenge-killings to kidnappings. Sharp increases in each have occurred in the past six months. Ample evidence suggests that segments of the militia units that comprise the Iraqi army are involved in various such actions during off-duty hours.

In such societal breakdown, heavily resourced factions, such as those in the Iraqi ruling groups which we support will be able to create pockets of safety and the semblance of governance such as the Green Zone. But generally neither the capital nor other cities are safe. National infrastructure will continue to deteriorate meaning less electricity and usable water. In a society like Iraq, which is armed to the teeth and with few economic opportunities, such violence will be on-going, increasingly criminalized - possibly through links to terrorist networks - and forced to be more lethal by various social groups increasingly pressured to protect their own.

This is not civil war. It is so much worse than that. It is decentralized, multi-group, anarchic violence which thrives on under-mining authority and the rule of law. Iraq has become its own blend of Lebanon, Liberia, or Colombia at their worst. Sadly, the factional, neighborhood and personal forms of violence may dwarf these other failed states.

History shows that such fierce and bloody factional fighting ends only when the parties involved often due to exhaustion - have a basic need to end such violence. The Bush Administration misreads the minimal decline in Shiite-Sunni factional violence of the past weekend as a decision by the Iraqis not to pursue civil war. In fact, Iraqis don’t need a civil war in the traditional sense to escalate and deescalate the violence they want. There is an efficient economy of violence in Iraq which finds its own sick, devastating equilibrium point where armed groups can attack each other at will.

And the existing US presence has not been able to stifle the emergence of the trend. In fact, the US is becoming sidelined in much of the violence in Iraq. Because we have a lot of presence, a lot of people, and a lot of firepower, we still make good targets. But the data released by the Pentagon during the first week of February points to larger numbers of Iraqi civilians killed, increases in Iraqi security forces dead, and less lethal attacks on Americans. This led the Pentagon, in its passion for metrics, to interpret these data as indicating that Iraqis are taking more control of their own security. The last ten days of violence in the country contradict that claim.

Within this deteriorating anarchy attempts to train an Iraq armed forces and police are likely to be much too little and far too late. The violence that is most devastating unfolds around us. Understandably, those dependent on us for their personal security always will be the last to suggest that we depart. Yet survey data across ethnic and religious groups taken in late 2005 reveals that most Iraqis, under most circumstances, want the US to leave their country soon.

So the US finds itself in the most ludicrous of positions: it is increasingly marginal to the control of the violence in Iraq, held more responsible for such outbreaks, but few Iraqis want us to remain. Faced with such a reality, even the conservative columnist William Buckley wrote this past week that it is time for President Bush to declare defeat, bring the troops home and find various other foreign policy ventures where we can be successful and restore national pride and purpose.

The cold, hard truth is that we cannot stop the violence in Iraq that our invasion has unleashed. In fact, the US effort in Iraq has become less and less about our own soldiers, and even less and less about the Iraqi people. In different and sinister ways, each has become instrumental in the worst political and moral sense. For the Bush Administration, the war in Iraq, and how it is portrayed and discussed, is now about the US elections in November. So we are likely to hear any number of assertions from Washington like those of this week: that the Iraqis are marching down the right road, choosing against civil war and for politics. The White House will continue to paint a false and bright picture of what has become anarchy.

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George A. Lopez is Senior Fellow at the Joan B. Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies at the University of Notre Dame.

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