For months now, skeptics of George W. Bush's Iraq policy have been warning that the present path could lead to bloody civil war. More recently, proponents of a continued U.S. military presence have been warning that bloody civil war would be the result of a withdrawal. Both sides can, perhaps, stop warning -- the civil war has already begun. Recent events in Mosul, a multi-ethnic city in northern Iraq that is the country's third-largest after Baghdad and Basra, lack the clear-cut structure of a Fort Sumter but otherwise bear all the markings of ethnic and sectarian warfare.
Most news accounts portrayed the fighting in Mosul -- the result of an insurgent counteroffensive in the wake of the American assault on Fallujah -- as part of a conventional narrative of insurgents versus combined U.S. and Interim Government forces. The reality is rather more troubling. The town's 5,000-strong police force, commanded by and largely composed of Sunni Arabs, melted away in the face of the Sunni Arab insurgency, with some policemen going over to the other side. Peter Galbraith, reporting for the December issue of the Prospect before fighting broke out, noted that the leadership of the Mosul police department was widely believed to be collaborating with the insurgency, and that the city's Kurdish community had already for this reason created parallel governance and security institutions for the neighborhoods in which they reside. When American forces entered the city to retake it from the insurgency, the Iraqi forces at their side were, in turn, Kurdish peshmerga fighters brought in from the surrounding area.
The fight, in other words, was not between an American-backed government and anti-government rebels. It was, rather, a simple fight between Sunni Arabs and Kurds with ostensible agents of the Interim Government on both sides. Rather than unique to Mosul, the situation seems rather typical of events throughout Iraq. The commander of police in Tikrit, a Sunni Arab town that's been relatively peaceful, recently claimed that Israel and Iran (which is to say the Kurdish and Shiite factions that they have respectively aided) were responsible for the terrorist violence in Iraq when, in fact, his Sunni Arab coreligionists are to blame. American soldiers and junior officers are widely skeptical of the loyalty of Iraqi security forces throughout Sunni-majority areas; though senior commanders don't put it this way, their clear preference for relying on Kurdish troops to do the heavy lifting indicates that they see the same picture.
In the north (including Mosul) security is provided by peshmerga currently aligned with the Interim Government but more loyal to Kurdistan than to Iraq as they've been happy to make clear in disputed areas like Kirkuk. In many southern towns, security is effectively in the hands of militias loyal to one or the other Shiite party rather than to the government per se.
Last weekend's fracas over whether or not to delay the scheduled January elections for a national assembly confirms the trend. Ostensibly a dispute about whether or not security will be sufficient to permit credible elections, the true dividing lines are rather different. Sunni and secular parties, sure to be worse off after secular and Sunni-friendly (though actually Shiite by heritage) Iyad Allawi is replaced by a government dominated by Shiite Islamists, want a delay. The Shiite parties, in turn, think elections (and the Shiite rise to power) can't come soon enough. The Kurdish parties say they could live with either outcome, but would prefer a delay.
Thus, contrary to the Bush administration's hopes, elections themselves will not solve Iraq's problems. The trouble is not merely that some factions within Iraq are opposed to the very idea of democracy (though no doubt some are), but that what's at stake in these sorts of disputes is the very nature of the political community to be governed democratically. A community that might be quite happy to govern itself democratically still has no reason to support a conception of majoritarian democracy that will guarantee its own subordination to a larger community to which it happens to have been yoked by the mapmakers of the British Empire.
What elections will do is provide the United States with an opportunity to declare victory and go home. Though it would gall liberals (this one included) to see the administration proclaim its aims accomplished and the war a triumph sometime in early spring 2005, the reality is that the best chance to end American participation in the war is to do so in a way that permits a political win for the administration and some face-saving on the international stage. Leaving before an election that's scheduled to take place in just about 60 days, after having come this far, would be bizarre. Staying much longer would be hopeless. The political problem that underlies the security problem that, in turn, underlies Iraq's economic, public health, and other difficulties can only be resolved by a political agreement among the relevant parties. The United States cannot force anyone to agree, if only because we cannot credibly commit to enforcing any agreement indefinitely.
The theoretical basis of such an agreement -- federalism, sharing of oil revenues, etc. -- is easy enough to see; the only question is whether the leaders of Iraq's major groups prefer to make that agreement, or prefer to take their chances with violence. If an agreement can be made, our presence won't have much use and would simply introduce another contentious issue into the mix. If it cannot, then staying in the country will only leave us caught in an increasingly deadly crossfire.
Matthew Yglesias is a Prospect staff writer.
