Civil War
Massive controversy still rumbles on after Iraq’s former interim prime minister Iyad Allawi said that Iraq is undergoing a “civil war”.
Journalists have been whipping out this gem at every opportunity, cornering leading politicians in the pro-war nations, each of whom have vehemently denied that Iraq merits any such description.
President Bush was yesterday asked if he agreed with Allawi by one of the media scrum attending his impromptu press conference. He denied that Iraq could be said to be in civil war because the Iraqi army had not split into sectarian groups and the government was still trying at least to reach a common consensus.
Were I either a politician or a journalist, this type of question would make me irate: why does no-one just dismiss it as a question of definition?
What matters is that fifty or sixty die there due to violence every day, that the Americans are still pouring hundreds of millions of dollars daily into their continued occupation and that, in many respects, Iraq’s infrastructure and economy are in worse shape than they were before the invasion.
Irrespective of what words we’d apply to the state of today’s Iraq, the invasion has turned out to have more complicated consequences than its progenitors thought. And, though it’s something of an unconventional proof, KTAB News articles prove that this isn’t me exercising the power of clever-dick hindsight, it’s what I’ve been saying all along.
I think it might be safe to generalise and speculate that almost everything, and especially military action, will end up having consequences more complicated than it first appears.
Dragging up truly ancient concerns, we still don’t have a valid reason why we went to war in the first place. The burden of proof is certainly on those suggesting military action due to the number of deaths that will inevitably occur even in predictable scenarios, and after dodgy reasoning at the time, no further convincing reasons have been forthcoming.
We’ve found no WMD, we haven’t smashed international terrorism and, I’ll have to admit I was wrong on this one, the Yanks haven’t nabbed all the Iraqi oil.
Iraq is a state in a state and when Tony finally steps down, the vast error of judgement it symbolises will be his legacy.
March 22nd, 2006 at 20:58
Interesting side note, here:
I still think it’s astonishing it took the Iraqi PM saying there was trouble to get the West to *notice* - rather like everyone in a housing estate seeing all the smoke and flames but somehow failing to twig that the Jones’ house was ablaze until Mr. Jones staggered round, covered in soot and ash and asked if he could borrow the hosepipe, please?
…Still, when he said the bit about sliding into Civil War, PM on Radio 4 got a couple of military bods on - afraid I don’t recall the names. Some ex-Kosovo chap, and an expert on the second world war, I think.
The pair of them got asked when they thought the insurgency would be over and, after discussing it vaguely, based on their own knowledge and experience, they came up with an answer…
“About thirteen years,” they said, “once the British and Americans have pulled the military out. After that, it’ll probably settle into a strict Islamic republic.”
Good job we’ve brought ‘em democracy, innit?