Without much notice and even less discussion, "civil war" has become the new
abracadabra phrase for American foreign policy.
Sen. Joe Biden leads the magicians who've seemed to convince everybody that
it never makes sense to get involved in a civil war. In March, he screamed
from the Senate floor: "I'm so tired of hearing on this floor about courage.
Have the courage to tell the administration, ŒStop this ridiculous policy
you have.' We're taking sides in a civil war."
Biden's not alone. It's become a standard talking point for most major
opponents of the Iraq war. The Democrats' Iraq-withdrawal point man in the
House, John Murtha, says we're "caught in a civil war" in almost every
interview, as if this is the geopolitical equivalent of "I've fallen and
can't get up." Senator Majority Leader Harry Reid said last week that, "We
stand united ... in our belief that troops are enmeshed in an intractable
civil war."
The assumption behind this gambit is obvious: Declaring it a civil war is
like blowing a whistle at the end of the game. There's nothing left to do
but pack up the equipment and go home.
Al-Qaida in Iraq (and perhaps the Iranians) have clearly figured this out.
That's why they consistently try to stoke sectarian passions by, for
example, bombing the Golden Mosque in Samarra, Iraq's holiest Shia shrine.
That 2006 attack prompted the formation of Shiite militias and death squads,
which in turn provided fresh evidence that Iraq was heading toward civil
war.
Meanwhile, the Bush administration has been desperate to keep the press from
describing the situation in Iraq as a "civil war," for the obvious reason
that the administration will lose its remaining support if the American
public thinks this is just a civil war.
OK, but here's what I don't get: Why? Why is it obvious that intervening in
a civil war is not only wrong but so self-evidently wrong that merely
calling the Iraqi conflict a civil war closes off discussion?
Surely it can't be a moral argument. Every liberal foreign policy do-gooder
in Christendom wants America to interject itself in the Sudanese civil war
unfolding so horrifically in Darfur. The high-water mark in post-Vietnam
liberal foreign policy was Bill Clinton's intervention in the Yugoslavian
civil war. If we can violate the prime directive of no civil wars for Darfur
and Kosovo, why not for Kirkuk and Basra?
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