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posted March 9, 2006 at 10:50 a.m.

Rumsfeld: Iraqi troops, not US, to fight a civil war

US military officials now say civil war, not insurgency, greatest security threat to Iraq.

By Tom Regan | csmonitor.com

If civil war breaks out in Iraq, it will be primarily Iraqi security forces that will fight it, US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld told Congress Thursday. Army Gen. John P. Abizaid, the top US commander in the Middle East, who appeared with Mr. Rumsfeld, said sectarian violence has reached an "unprecedented level," and is now a greater security concern than the insurgency, reports the Washington Post.

"The plan is to prevent a civil war, and to the extent one were to occur, to have the . . . Iraqi security forces deal with it to the extent they're able to," Rumsfeld told the Senate Appropriations Committee when pressed to explain how the United States intended to respond should Iraq descend wholesale into internecine strife.
If civil war becomes reality, "it's very clear that the Iraqi forces will handle it, but they'll handle it with our help," Abizaid said later when asked to elaborate on Rumsfeld's remark.

Both men said Iraq is not currently in a state of civil war, and the key to preventing one is the rapid formation of a government with representation from the Sunni, Shiite and Kurdish communities.


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But British journalist Ben McIntyre writes in The Times of London, that the US might be "afraid to admit it," but civil war has already started in Iraq. Mr. McIntyre says that the US and Britain have been so reluctant to use the phrase, that the Pentagon actually has an official whose job it is to argue with academics who say the war has already started. But McIntyre also points out that towns around Baghdad, where Shiites and Sunnis once were integrated, are now splitting along sectarian lines. And there is evidence that if the US pulled out, "full-blown carnage would ensue."

The US-led coalition continues to portray the violence as the work of a group of rebels seeking to oust a government, democratically elected by the Iraqi people and defended by US and British armed forces. The evidence, however, suggests that the war has moved into a new phase, with Shiite battling Sunni regardless of the Iraqi government or the external military power, with each side operating its own death squads. Sunni and Shiite, inheritors of an ancient sectarian conflict dating back 14 centuries, are now competing violently, not just for political power, but for Iraq's oil riches.

McIntyre says it is also the history of civil war that it only ends when "one side crushes the other," which means the majority Shiite community would probably win, but at the cost of drawing Iran, Jordan, and even Saudi Arabia into the conflict.

Conservative TV talk show host and former Republican congressman Joe Scarborough write in his MSNBC blog, however, that Iraq is not in a state of civil war. And Mr. Scarborough says that idea "is a conclusion that could be drawn by one who is either too stupid to be on TV or just liberal enough to have his own news show."

While talking heads in America and Europe were furiously wishing civil war on Iraq, the Iraqi army did an admirable job keeping peace last week after the Shiite mosque was blown apart. As the New York Post's Ralph Peters reports from Iraq, far from leading that country down the path to civil war, the mosque bombing has shown Iraqis that its security forces have made great strides.

Gareth Porter, an historian and national security policy analyst, writes in the Asia Times, however, that one reason sectarian violence receded a few days after the initial outburst following the bombing of the Golden Dome mosque, was that Sunnis were preparing militias of their own to protect their mosques and imams in the case of another wave of attacks.

Nancy Youssef of Knight-Ridder reported on February 28 that Sunnis "across Central Iraq" were "alarmed at how easily Shiite forces had attacked their mosques". Based on interviews with Sunnis in Fallujah and in Diyala province, Youssef wrote that they were now organizing militias to fight Shiites in Baghdad and elsewhere, smuggling weapons into those areas and planning to prepare to send more fighters there in case of future attacks. Muqtada al-Sadr said his militiamen had already captured Sunni weapons being infiltrated into the capital.
The implication of Youssef's reporting is that another bomb blast on a Shiite religious target by Al Qaeda operatives is almost certain to trigger sustained Sunni-Shiite fighting. Two such terrorist bombings have already been carried out this year.

And a new Associated Press-Ipsos Reid poll shows that 77 percent of Americans think civil war is likely to break out in Iraq. They are also evenly divided on whether a stable democratic government can survive in Iraq.