Now that America’s liberals have eagerly pounced on the
civil war description, let them tell us who the opponent
is. And then let them explain why it makes sense not to
fight.
CALL IT A CIVIL WAR
By Dean Barnett
SOXBLOG
WE KNOW WHY THE LEFT wants to call what’s going on in Iraq a civil war. The impulse to call it a civil war comes from the same place the that the need to trumpet every car bomb that exploded in Iraq came from. The people calling it a civil war do so for the same reason that they rallied around an overtly anti-Semitic lunatic like Cindy Sheehan.
The left wants to embarrass the Bush administration. It wants to humiliate and marginalize it. So declaring that Iraq is embroiled in a civil war three years after Operation Iraqi Freedom certainly conveys a lack of progress. Calling it a civil war means the administration’s efforts to date have failed. It suggests that the administration is incompetent – a total bust.
I don’t buy the “civil war” description, at least so far as the term is understood in the American vernacular. But to hell with that. Let’s call it a civil war.
On one side, we have the American troops and the Iraqi government. My question for the left is this: Who’s on the other side?
IF IRAQ IS INDEED IN A CIVIL WAR, then the people we’re fighting are people that we have to fight. They’re Jihadists bent on expanding their philosophy. Or they’re unrepentant Saddamites who can’t be trusted to behave responsibly with a government at their disposal. Or they’re just nihilistic terrorists fighting war under the banner of radical Islam and Sharia’a.
The insurgency doesn’t have an agenda in the sense that no one fighting for the insurgency will ‘fess up to its true purposes. Normally in a civil war you’d have an insurgency that would be promising things like a workers’ paradise. This civil war has no such thing.
The insurgents can’t claim their agenda because if they did, their agenda would make America’s next move obvious. Our next move would be so obvious, even people as hidebound as Ted Kennedy would get it.
The insurgents’ agenda is the same as Osama bin Laden’s. They want to continue the spread of Sharia’a and enrich the cause of radical Islam. But if they ever publicly said so, even individuals as intellectually nimble as Jack Murtha would have trouble making the case for why we should leave these people alone and not fight them. After all, the biggest problem in the war on terror is locating the enemy so he can then be killed. In Iraq anyway, this problem has been solved.
The neo-cons’ widely belittled dream that gave birth to the Iraq war was that the Middle East had to be integrated into the rest of the civilized world. This would necessarily involve the defeat of radical Islam. Iraq was considered and has turned out to be as good a place as any to start.
It’s important to note that this venture wasn’t spawned by Republican warmongers or, worse still, Wilsonian dreamers. Folding the Middle East into the family of civilized nations (or the Core as Tom Barnett refers to it) has to be done for reasons of self preservation. The clock is ticking – left unchecked some bad actor in that region will develop the ability to hurt us in a way that makes 9/11 look like a walk in the park. We can either change things there before that happens or afterwards.
SO BY ALL MEANS, let’s call it a civil war. Let’s defer to our friends on the left on this. And then let’s ask who exactly it is that’s fighting against us and the established government in Iraq. After all, war, especially a civil war, needs two recognizable sides.
Now that America’s liberals have eagerly pounced on the civil war description, let them tell us who the opponent is. And then let them explain why it makes sense not to fight.
Responses? Thoughts? Please email them to me at soxblog@aol.com
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