If, for argument's sake, we can agree that war is armed conflict between countries and civil war is armed conflict between opposing groups within a country, it would then stand to reason that under the rosiest scenario our worse fears have been realized in Iraq.
The war between Israel and Hezbollah has served as a temporary detour from the fact that "Operation Iraqi Freedom" has morphed into what my friend Farai Chideya calls "Operation F.U.B.A.R." (A Google search will decipher the acronym) In spite of the president's optimistic assessments that we've "turned the corner," on the ground there is another reality.
As we've turned the corner past preemptive strike, bad intelligence, no weapons of mass destruction, "Mission Accomplished," Valerie Plame, Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay, a "few bad apples," and poor post-Saddam planning we now find ourselves at the dead end of civil war.
According to a United Nations report, in the last 60 days, the Iraqi death toll is 100 per day--that calculates to 36,500 for the year. In the first six months of 2006 the UN estimates that 14,338 Iraqis have died violently.
Yes, Saddam was a bad man; and, literally speaking, the world as a whole is better with him behind bars; but at what cost, permanent damage to America's moral credibility?
And to think many of the same neo-cons that sold the president the war against Iraq are now talking about more war throughout the region. This is not some intellectual exercise; their half-baked theories are leading to unnecessary death. Please Mr. President, enough already!
We have watched as the neo-con cabal, who still cannot distinguish napalm from diet Coke in a taste test, has led the country down a primrose path for which there is no honorable way out. The Bush PR campaign whipped up the country into a nationalistic frenzy, suggesting that anyone who questioned the war against Iraq was, at best, anti-American or ostensibly pro-Saddam.
How many photos of dead Iraqis laying in the streets will it require before we collectively realize that we are chiefly responsible for the carnage? How comforting are the slogans, watchwords, and shibboleths such as "Better to fight them over there that to have to fight them here" now that we are three years removed and the emotion of fear has been replaced by reality?
There is nothing that we've done positive that offsets the death of 100 Iraqis per day. Moreover, as the Herald UK online recently editorialized, the electricity generation remains around pre-war levels, which is half of the estimated demand. Roughly 50 percent of households have a table supply of drinking water. And the unemployment rate continues to hover between 35-40 percent.
As someone who has been opposed to the Iraq invasion from its inception, I take no joy in writing this piece. In fact, I am profoundly disappointed in my country. But there can be no disappointment where there is not a corresponding amount of love.
Unfortunately, there are no pain-free solutions. The available choices are simple: we either redeploy our troops, allowing the opposing forces in Iraq to have at it unencumbered or significantly increase troop levels from the existing 130,000. For those who have advocated for redeployment, myself included, I don't see how we can leave, given what we've created.
But is it too much to demand that also we have the truth? There is no way to move forward as a nation if we cannot be honest about our immoral actions and what led to them. While the Democrats did not create Iraq, it is America's problem. They should not assume that they are immune from stain of Iraq. If memory serves me correctly, there were just enough Democrats supporting the war to make it bipartisan.
Whatever we do going forward the task will be challenging. We have backed ourselves into an immoral corner with no way to escape. For we have already ignored the warnings of James Madison: "No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare."