The For-What War?

"Now, more than ever, the grieving father [Swadi Ghilan] says he wants to hunt down and kill not only Sunni guerrilla fighters but also Sunnis who give those fighters shelter and support. By that, he means killing most Sunnis in Iraq. ‘There are two Iraqs; it's something that we can no longer deny,' Ghilan said. ‘The army should execute the Sunnis in their neighborhoods so that all of them can see what happens, so that all of them learn their lesson.'"

Shiite Swadi Ghilan's two sons were murdered this year by Sunni insurgents. He is now a soldier in the 4,500-member 1st Brigade of the 6th Iraqi Division, a largely "stood up" unit of the new American-trained Iraqi Army. As Knight Ridder's Tom Lasseter tells us in one of the most important, if bloodcurdling, reports to emerge from Iraq recently, "American commanders often refer to the 1st Brigade as a template for the future of Iraq's military."

It is one of the canons of faith in the American mainstream that our military can't leave Iraq until the Iraqi Army is capable of standing on its own. Only this, and the now over 150,000 troops we have in Iraq, are said to lie between the hideous, devolving present and the country's collapse into full-scale civil war. That sounds reasonable enough unless, as Lasseter did, you were to hang out with the 1st Brigade for a while. Here's what Lasseter discovered:

The Brigade is essentially a Shiite outfit, whose ranks are filled with Swadi Ghilans burning for revenge against Iraq's Sunni population, and a commander who "regularly reviews important decisions, including troop distribution, with a prominent local Shiite cleric." As Lasseter comments,

"The Bush administration's exit strategy for Iraq rests on two pillars: an inclusive, democratic political process that includes all major ethnic groups and a well-trained Iraqi national army. But a week spent eating, sleeping and going on patrol with a crack unit of the Iraqi army suggests that the strategy is in serious trouble... Instead of rising above the ethnic tension that's tearing their nation apart, the mostly Shiite troops are preparing for, if not already fighting, a civil war against the minority Sunni population... Increasingly… they look and operate less like an Iraqi national army unit and more like a Shiite militia."

Given Lasseter's piece and similar reports elsewhere -- Rory Carroll of the Guardian, recently kidnapped and released, wrote, "Government officials admit that Shia militias with links to Iran have infiltrated the police and army. Human rights groups accuse them of operating death squads against Sunnis." -- another question might be asked: What is the Iraqi Army actually being stood up for? The Iraqi government in Baghdad's Green Zone is an awkward Shiite-Kurdish alliance. Little surprise that the new army should also be mainly a mix of Shiite and Kurdish units, or that its goals should be less than "national." Those who want the United States to remain ever longer in Iraq to prevent a possibly genocidal civil war might consider whether the act of remaining -- especially with the Bush administration running the show -- isn't also the act of creating a civil war, whether by happenstance or by design.

Start with the fact that the number of American troops in the country has actually been on the rise recently; that this administration continues to invest in gigantic, increasingly permanent bases in the country; and that it is as unwilling to write off such bases or future control over Iraqi oil as it is to agree to a congressional anti-torture resolution. Then put the sort of Iraqi Army described by Lasseter in the context of an ongoing American punitive campaign of growing brutality against the Sunni insurgency. In that war, among other things, uncontested air power is regularly unleashed against, and has already dismantled, huge swathes of a number of largely Sunni cities and towns like Fallujah and Tal Afar. This is a formula not for preventing civil war but for fomenting it.

Then put the new constitution, which clearly is meant to transfer power almost completely out of Sunni hands and into those of the Shiite religious and Kurdish political parties, and you have the makings of a grim formula indeed. As Time magazine's Tony Karon suggested in a recent, not-to-be-missed essay at his Rootless Cosmopolitan blog, "If anything, a successful referendum is more likely to bolster Sunni support for the insurgency." Again the unasked question may be: Constitution for what? And this may turn out to be the For-What War.

Tom Engelhardt, who runs the Nation Institute's Tomdispatch.com ("a regular antidote to the mainstream media"), is the co-founder of the American Empire Project and the author of The End of Victory Culture, a history of American triumphalism in the Cold War. His novel, The Last Days of Publishing, has just come out in paperback. 

Read other columns by Tom Engelhardt  

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