"HOW CAN THIS NOT BE A CIVIL WAR? It won't get a tenth of the attention that the O'Hanlon/Pollack op-ed got, but Lt. Colonel Gian Gentile's op-ed in The Washington Post today is a pretty searing description of how deeply Iraq has tumbled into civil war, and how resistant the situation is to the good intentions and inventive interventions of American troops:
I decided that the best way to secure the neighborhood would be to hire local men, vetted by me and trusted imams in the district, and turn them into a police force. Not only did this prove to be exceedingly difficult, but government officials often told me that doing this was arming their enemy.I ordered a concrete barrier to be built around Amiriyah and limited entry to one checkpoint controlled by the Iraqi army. The goal was to keep Sunni insurgents from bringing in weapons and to prevent attacks by Shiite militias. But while the barrier helped isolate the neighborhood from outside insurgents and militias, it could not stop, and actually facilitated, killings within Amiriyah. The security we helped provide for Sunnis gave them increased freedom to go out and kill Shiites or, more recently, to conduct fights against local al-Qaeda members. Amiriyah became one of the safest areas in Baghdad for Sunnis but lethal for the few remaining Shiites.[...]The war that I faced was an insurgency within a civil war. I wish it had been the other way around. Had it been a civil war within an insurgency, the extremes could have been targeted and controlled and the large center of the people moved toward local compromise.My primary objective as a commander was to protect all the people. I felt a measure of responsibility every time a Shiite body showed up on the streets. One day last October, my patrol came upon a scene I keep trying to forget. A man was lying on the street; his wife, who had blood running down her face, stood nearby crying as she clutched their baby. The child in her arms was dead, shot in the head, as the father had been. The man, who was a Sunni, and his child were killed by Sunni insurgents or local Sunnis -- sometimes it was hard to tell them apart -- because he had married a Shiite woman.How can this not be civil war?
--Ezra Klein
