That was worth the wait. I nominate

"I'd like to think that the Middle East can do what the West did, without all the suffering. But if it takes regional fratricide, then so be it."

for line of the year.

Who wants to take bets on the trackback for this sucker? I say 10 minimum...

Christianity was a violent religion until the Thirty Years War.

Christian violence didn't start until Christianity was nationalized. The problem was monarchy and all the petty vindictiveness and covetousness that comes with it. Public religion in autocratic societies can't be compared to private religion - it's like comparing Scientology to science.

•We need to choose a side right the now, and stick to it until the bloody end.

There is no good side for us to pick.

If we choose the shia, the Iranians get one of the things they want and all of the sunni governments start to worry about what side the US would back if a civil war broke out in their country.

If we choose the sunni, the chance of democratic revolution in Iran becomes nil, and our only chance of keeping Iraq from going to hell will be to pick a strongman. He might be more discreet than Saddam, but he won't be any less brutal- if he's not, he won't survive.

Our only chance of pulling through this thing is to get a group of Iraqis who put being Iraqi ahead of their sectarian affiliation and back them... and even if they win, they're going to be considered the US's puppets.

Something to consider in all this: who benefits from this event and the resulting chaos?

I can't help but wonder if Iran isn't somehow behind the Golden Mosque bombing which brought this serious discussion of civil war to the forefront. They certainly would benefit from any instability in Iraq, and it deflects attention from their nuclear ambitions.

Rosignol almost notices the problem with this analysis, and it's that the US must pick a side and stick with it. It's not a Sunni v. Shia side to pick, though, because there'll initially be 43 sides to pick from, divided among the religious sects and including Kurds, Turkmen, etc...

Obviously, if the US picks a side, that side "wins." And the terrorism goes on.

Best result: more of the same as right now until, a decade from now, would-be terrorist recruits wonder why they're rebelling against a US protected government that gives them cable Internet, whiskey and McDonalds.

The sad truth is the US needs to set up a permanent mission in Iraq, tell the US public we're pulling out of Germany to afford this, and admit it's going to be a long, long time before we leave.

We leave anytime soon, civil war for sure. We park an armored division and an infantry division 30 miles south of Baghdad, we get the middle east version of Germany.

I'm not so pessimistic (I never am about Iraq). The post quoting Haider Ajina on Powerline this morning, the post on Hewitt yesterday (Updating From Iraq), and a report on NPR the other day that Sadr's Shiite militias had formed up to defend Sunni mosques tell me that the violence is probably not as universal as they're being reported.

msm is screaming civil war. msm hasn't been accurate on anything in recent memory. i'd like to hear from those on the ground unrelated to the boobs in the msm.

anyone heard from michael yon, or anyone similar, in the last 24 hours?

Last I heard, Mr. Yon was stateside.

The best source of firsthand info we've got is the iraqi bloggers, but they can't give us an overview.

"Al-watha' al-shadh" - a perplexing predicament.

This is a term that became popular in Parliament and in the press during the British "mandate" in Iraq following WW I.

It referred to the impossibility of government by the dual authority of the mandate. The nationalists argued that there were two governments in Iraq, one foreign and the other national, and that such a regime was an abnormality that, though feasible in theory, was unworkable in practice.

Does this begin to sound familiar? If that doesn't work, try Britain & India, or Britian and the American colonies.

Something, somewhere is going to ring a bell.

Unless you are prepared to impose a strong dictator (Saddam like)on the region, you can't control it. It isn't that they haven't known western style government before. They tried a British constitutional monarchy. Didn't take. The boundaries are artifical, imposed on the region after the destruction of the Ottomans so why in the world would you expect a happy unity where it has never existed before.

Here's a contrarian thought:

Civil wars don't simply erupt. They are usually the product of a prolonged tension between two (or more) sides, papered over by compromises as each side becomes more radicalized and less compromising.

Civil wars (especially religious civil wars) are often frightfully bloody.

But

at the end of the day, when the civil war has been fought, the result is often far more stable, because, in the course of the knock-down/drag-out, the situation is resolved once and for all, with few illusions remaining as to whether the losing side "coulda, woulda, shoulda" won.

In the American Civil War, for example, slavery-abolition, state's rights-federal power, these issues were decided fairly decisively. Ditto, as you note, for the English Civil War.

Doesn't mean you necessarily like the results (e.g., Russian, Chinese civil wars), but then again, civil wars don't seem to recur too often (when was the last time the US, UK, France, Russia, or China fought a civil war?), perhaps b/c it also forces the survivors to recognize that perhaps compromise is better than fighting a bloody war?

Christianity was a violent religion until the Thirty Years War. That war lasted so long, and killed so many people (the population of Germany was reduced by a third), that Christendom lost its bloodlust. Freedom of conscience was born on the battlefields of central Europe. The Middle East hasn't suffered that kind of loss; they haven't yet had their fill of blood; they haven't yet become disgusted with tyranny. I'd like to think that the Middle East can do what the West did, without all the suffering. But if it takes regional fratricide, then so be it.

We seem to be thinking along the same lines.

In which I say:

"Of course, any holy book is subject to interpretation. Neither Jews nor Christians obey the Law of Moses by carrying out capital punishment for idolatry. It takes a lot for a people to reach the point where they decide that a reinterpretation is necessary, though. For Jews it was the Diaspora, in which they were expelled from the holy land by the Romans after numerous rebellions against the Roman occupation. Deprived of a state, they no longer had the power to enforce the Law of Moses except as a set of cultural norms that they carried with them to the regions where they settled.

"For Christians the crisis was the Protestant Rebellion and the sectarian wars that resulted from it. In the wake of Luther's challenge of Church corruption, interpretation of the Bible splintered like the shards of a broken mirror. Where before a monolithic church had been able to suppress dissent through persecution, corruption had eroded the foundation of its moral authority. Initially the new sects were fully as intolerant as the church had been. In those places where they acquired power, the persecuted became the persecutors. Beginning with a few lone voices, though, the idea of religious toleration began to take hold. Eventually it had to be recognized that enforcing religious orthodoxy was not worth the cost in blood and destruction of wealth."

"It took about three hundred years of slaughter to reach that point though--and this, even though Jesus explicitly said his kingdom was not of this world. How much more difficult will it be for those who worship a prophet who claimed to have established the kingdom of God on Earth?"

I too am concerned that the analogy that the maturation of Islam might parallel that of Christianity is wishful thinking. As Ardsgaine noted, Chistianity is based upon the notion that what is Caeser's is Caeser's and what is God's is God's. Islam has no such distinction. Christianity didn't really begin to understand its more violent potential until Islam began its expansion through violent conquest. And much of what happened in Europe in the middle of the second millenium was political through the various princes and kings of the region. Luther's complaint was about biblical purity against what he felt were incorrect teachings and practices in the Catholic church. He had no intention of splitting the church. The church leaders had little ability, with the exception of the cardinals in France, to drive military action once the crusades ended. Even so, there was a fair amount of killing in the Lord's name unfortunately. Islam doesn't seem to have any of these potential factors to stop it. Radical Imans drive the military (terrorist) actions. They have an insulated and soon nuclear patron state. Their holy book makes even the most orthodox reading of the old testament laws as a bunch of pikers. And there seems to be very little attempt by adherants within the muslem religion to badmouth the things done in its name. I am afraid that with the introduction of WMD in this equation, a middle east civil war will be dangerous, and will hit us on our shores. The maturation of Islam will not be able to take the CHristian path

I say take the side of the Kurds and take advantage of a civil war to carve out a Kurdish nation from Turkey, Iraq and Iran. If civil war erupts, the best we can hope for is that it spreads into Syria, Iran and Saudi Arabia. Might as well clean up much of this mess once and for all.

Joe - ahh that it were that simple. That would be nice indeed.

Fine mess indeed. And who got us into this? Stan Laurel or his spiritual companion at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. The sheer bankruptcy of the pro war crowd stands revealed by this post. No well maybe we got this wrong, etc. instead it's blame the folks who predicted these outcomes from the start, throw in a bit of personal abuse for good measure. The fact is that Bush's foreign policy is in tatters in just about every region of the world. We're loosing South America, anti Americanism is in the stratosphere in the middle east and Asia, the Chinese are taking us for a ride, and the Europeans and Canadians regard us with total disdain. The likely outcome of a civil war in Iraq is NOT good for the USA. The most oil rich southern part will become an Iranian puppet state if it isn't already. The central Sunnistan will be a hot bed of terrorism. And when the Kurds try to set up Kurdistan the Turks move in. We've destabilized the country and region, and the best the pro war crowd can now offer is the Marthaesque civil wars are a good thing. Bizarre.

I'm with Joe regarding the Kurds. We left them hanging once, lets not do it again. They have a civil society, a functioning government and a growing economy. And, despite our past deceit, they are allies.

So, if civil war breaks out we should bring 80% of our troops home right away and put the remaining 20% on the Kurdistan border.

I'm still cautiously optimistic about Iraq but quite pessimistic about the free world v. Islam. Iran or Iraq will be the catalyst to an out and out war because there doesn't seem to be any strong moderating forces within the Muslim world. The so-called religion of peace seems to thrive on violence and bloodshed and I see it getting worse before it gets better.

As predicted, Steve, cleanup on aisle 5!

John-

OK - let us hear what you would have done. I get pretty damned tired of Monday morning quarterbacking when you have nothing to offer by way of alternatives. And please spare me no WMD's, AQ wasn't in Iraq, they weren't looking for nukes, etc. All of that has been proven to be false. What do you do with a rogue state who has had WMD and used them, who does have ties with multiple terrorist groups, does have nuclear ambitions, and one of those terrorist groups has just toppled two of our largest buildings and crashed into the pentagon? Now discuss. There are other actions which might have been taken, what do you think. Otherwise, shut up! And what would you suggest now? Lots of folks of good faith have differing opinions and are struggling with where to go now. You need to read VDH on NRO Online for another perspective. South America is more than anything else the drug war issue which is completely different than the terrorist war. Canada just elected a more friendly government,as did Germany. China at this point knows they need us or their economy tanks. We took the European's advice on the Iranian nuke question and see what happened. Yeah, you definitely know what you are talking about. Hell, France is even threatening to blow Iran up - how dare they!

Now now JEM, it's quite obvious this is "All Bush's Fault." The world simply didn't *exist* prior to six years ago, after all.

I should point out to the "johns" of this world that the invasion of Iraq was still a success, even if it does break out into civil war (which, despite media hysteria, is still quite unlikely, and is hardly an unconsidered scenario).

The mission in the Iraq was was to remove the Hussein regime, which was already far too dangerous, with its history of WMD production and use, nuclear ambitions, and stupid invasions of neighboring countries. Even if Iraq now degenerates into civil war, it is still far less of a problem than a stable Iraq under the Hussein regime.

Rebuilding Iraq into a stable, democratic society is a decent, honorable, and smart thing to do. But it was never a requirement or primary goal. The post-invasion failure of Iraqi society is obviously not the best outcome, but an acceptable one as (from the U.S. point of view) it is still an improvement over what came before it.

Julie - How could I have been so foolish as to forget that important axiom of the "wise"!

I found a very intersting post this morning over at 24 steps to liberty. He is an Iraqi blogger that says the news in Iraq is very different from what we are hearing here in the US.

I have an excerpt and a link to his post here

Sistani didn't want to take care of Muqty and now he's paying for it.

Considering I've been to countries which no longer exist because they were artificial constructs, what's the big deal?

But I am getting very tired of cleaning up after Mother's (England's) messes.

I understand the comment

"Christianity was a violent religion until the
Thirty Years War. That war lasted so long,
and killed so many people (the population
of Germany was reduced by a third), that
Christendom lost its bloodlust."

but disagree that this is the key violent dynanmics.

Rather, I think Iraq is lacking a "Wild West" era.

Before America became a place with even slightly trustworthy courtrooms, we had to have a time when mobs and gangs could not rig the system from monopoly of weaponry. The days when every man wore a gun or two were thankfully temporary, but quite necessary.

"Guns make killing too easy", as famously said by Batman. But that's important. The national psyche needs an understanding that Mr. Menace cannot throw his weight around too much, and threaten the local judges, because even a little guy can fill him full of lead.

What in heavens name is everyone talking about on here? A civil war? Between which two armies? It won’t involve the Iraqi National Army, and even if it does it would be simple to contain because, brilliantly, The United States in agreement with Iraq has held off on creating heavy armor division with high power weapons. That is being supplied by the US and it will continue to be for a very long time. Only so much destruction can be done with machine guns. I’ll go ahead and pat Donald Rumsfeld on the back for you Stephen. Your sentence about accountability and throwing him in with the Mullahs actually made me want to puke.

Your fellow Pajamas Media contributor Iraq The Model said something that made a lot of sense:

The sense in the streets and the statements given by some Shia clerics suggest that retaliation attacks are organized and under control and are focusing on mosques frequented by Salafi and Wahabi groups and not those of ordinary Sunnis.

Finally someone said it. It’s not about Sunnis, and it never has been. It’s called a false correlation and everyone from market researchers to politcal pollsters fall into the same trap when they don’t research their results. All strip clubs are trashy, but just because you walk into a trashy bar don't mean you should expect the girls in there to take their clothes off for a dollar bill.

Heck even a Sunni endowment has offered millions to help rebuild the dome! The level at which the leaders in Iraq from nearly every sect are responding to this situation insures that a civil war will never happen.

-The American Patrol

I kind of wish we could just leave them to their own means, because, to be quite honest, the Middle East has some issues (starting with its borders), it needs to sort out over a couple of wars. Certainly that's how we're treating Africa right now (leave 'em to their own means).

Unfortunately, in that ultimate cruelty of history, they have all the oil, insuring foreign interference and forcing us to keep the region under control. The best way to keep the region under control is to foster stable, democratic, countries.

Amazingly enough, I'm still convinced that this is not an impossibility. All we have to do is put forth the effort. If we had 500,000 soldiers in Iraq, it wouldn't matter what Iran did. We'd have the border sealed and the security situation under control. Too bad our administration lacked the guts to do a decent job.

Ah - William?

Do you think that a Gore/Kerry administration would have done any better? If so, what would they have done differently? And why would that action(s) give a different result?

Those are fair questions, I think. For any honest person to at least try to answer.

I remind you of a famous (or should be famous) quotation from Thycidides: "The strong do what they can; the weak do what they must."

We're strong; they're weak. Please keep that in mind during your quiz.

Good Ole Charlie

Christian violence didn't start until Christianity was nationalized

I seem to recall a few instances of Christian violence which predate this. The purging of the Cathars and the Crusades among them. A quote:

Kill them all, God will know his own

Only so much destruction can be done with machine guns.

Spanish Civil War, 750,000 dead.

Good mornin America, time to wake up. Still trying to fit a square peg in a round hole. Democracy won't work in Iraq the way we want. No Democrats or Republicans here. It's tribes and religion my freinds and that ain't likely to change. Looks like the gig to prop up some political prostitutes to allow us to get that oil is just about up. We had Sadam in a cage with a gun to his head and he had the place under his steel-toed boots- now its pandoras box wide-opened.
All the slick spin and weave won't whitewash the red. WE will never be better off then when we had the dictator in his cage. The majority of American people are still half napping on this Iraq thing. They'll wake like angry bear when they think there's a draft in the wind. A draft is the only way we have chance to succeed. But a draft has no chance to be enacted.

We don't need a draft. We put half a million all volunteer soldiers into the first Gulf War without a problem. Of course it's difficult to sustain such numbers, but it can happen.

Charlie, I don't think Kerry would have cut it, Gore might have, but that's beside the point. When your leaders are being weak, which ours are, you call them out on it. What's the fastest way to solving the whole Middle Eastern Mess? Cut oil consumption, something Gore might have done.

Bush on the other hand seems to lack the will to do anything but pander to the American populace, refusing to make us sacrifice in any way lest he discomfort the voters.

Sure, Iraq was his own initiative, and a good one at that. Unfortunately his execution of the job was terrible, a point on which there can be little disagreement.

If you're going to do a job, do it right or don't do it at all.

Good Ole William:

You wrote: "If you're going to do a job, do it right or don't do it at all."

My question was: well, how would you do it? While GWB hasn't been Honest Abe Lincoln, he did do a job that needed doing.

There's no doubt that we could leave any country we want glowing in the dark for quite a few half-lives, but that's the drastic way. (Maybe not for Iran).

Again, please make an effort to answer the question? For starters, I don't think we're prepared to drastically cut oil consumption: we need the energy to stay afloat economically.

On this point I would make an effort to design safe, efficient nuclear plants to cut our dependence on electricity from burning oil. One way or another, nukes will be used over Iran: either atop missiles and in bombs or for power generation. Take your choice...

Or bann the use of SUV and other low mileage cars...now that should start a rebellion but fast.

Doing a good job in Iraq isn't that complicated: put some back bone into it.

It would have been nice had we played the diplomacy game better and gotten some foreign support, or been upfront and put democratization as the number one reason from day one, but I don't really blame GWB for that.

The obvious parts were that you need alot of soldiers to successfully occupy a nation and bend it to your will, something generals in the pentagon said from day one, and that you need a plan for after the action stopped. Sure, we have a plan now, but for the first few months after the invasion we were winging it. Those were the crucial months when the insurgency effectively built itself from scratch, taking advantage of the anarchy to cause real problems. Finally, we needed to put more money into reconstruction, albeit this can't happen without security. The estimate was 80-100 billion dollars to fully build up Iraq's infrastructure. We gave them 20, and that's now being tapped to fund Iraq's security forces.

From a security perspective, atleast before Iraq was balancing Iran. Now we can't touch Iran because they'll make Iraq burst into violence. Sadly, we can't really say we're better off for having invaded the place, because we did such a lazy job at it. That's what I meant.

As for oil, there's the ultimate solution, and it isn't that difficult. Raise the price of oil, and demand will drop. Basically, levy gas taxes. We could wait for inevitable market forces and OPEC to raise the price for us, but then Iran and Russia end up with all the money, while in the meantime our economy continues to be held hostage by the politics of the Middle East and other oil producers. If we levy a gas tax, the government gets that money, which they can then spend on our deficit, social services, or just plain refund it to the public.

Utilizing such methods as increasing CAFE standards and more nuclear plants would work as well, but by raising the price of gasoline, the government allows the market to work out the best solution (although we do need to make nuke construction easier).

Such methods work, Europe consumes much less oil than we do due to their taxes. Oil consumption does not equate with economic welfare: after the '79 crisis our consumption fell 4 million bpd while our GDP continued to grow.

As for political will, GWB has a strong base when it comes to national security issues, and if he presented it right, it could happen. Already he's making faux oil conservation efforts just because the political climate favors it. Had he taken the action after 9/11, announced a patriot gas tax and an effort to rid our economy of Middle Eastern oil forever, America certainly would have made the necessary sacrifices. Unfortunately, since then he's wasted alot of the patriotism and alot of his trust, but he should still make the effort.

Fact check: We are doing an incredibly good job in Iraq. To dispute this fact, please reference any country that lived under a dictatorship and has come this far, this fast, with less destruction and blood lost.

“Sealing” a border is an interesting concept. Minus about a billion land mines, I would also like to see someone explain just how one “seals” 2,300 miles worth of borders, half of which are open desert.

A single suicide bomber from out side of Iraq who can’t sneak across a “sealed” border can do so in the back of semi truck. The infrastructure that allows one suicidal maniac from Syria to execute his plan exists solely in Iraq, and that’s what Iraq and the coalition are fighting, and continue to make amazing progress on.

Hmm... How about post-Soviet Russia? Or post-Soviet Ukraine? Or post-soviet Poland? Or post WWII Japan? Or post WWII Germany? Or South Korea? Or Afghanistan? Can you give me a former dictatorship invaded by the world's most powerful democracy with the express purpose of democratization that isn't doing better than Iraq?

The only thing we've done in Iraq is held some successful elections. Their economic indicators are down, shi'ite militias are imposing religious law, the government itself is ineffective and corrupted, we can point to their improved armed forces but of course pre-war Iraq beats them hands down in that category, and they suffer from pandemic terrorism and emerging sectarian strife.

We are doing a lazy job in Iraq and its costing us. Its costing us lives, its costing us money, its pinning down our military, and its costing us diplomatically. We are doing a lazy job not because we can't do better but because our leaders didn't put forth the necessary effort. That's laziness, that's incompetence, and you cannot, especially in a democracy, let your leaders get away with it. Call it out.

Musical version:

Civil war!
huh!
What's it good for?
Never admiting the invasion was a mistake!
Huh!
Good God y'all!

Vodkapundit=Insanedipshit.

Always look on the bright side of a complete clusterfuck.

Christianity was a violent religion until the Thirty Years War. That war lasted so long, and killed so many people (the population of Germany was reduced by a third), that Christendom lost its bloodlust. Freedom of conscience was born on the battlefields of central Europe.

Permit me to disagree. Europe, after the Thirty Years War, did not lose it's bloodlust, it transferred it outwards. I give, by way of example: marketized slavery, colonialism, and conquering nearly the entire world through force of arms. Europe didn't get to the top of the heap by being nice, and that bloody ascent began with the formation of the modern Nation State with the Treaty of Westphalia. Leopold II of Belgium alone killed 10 to 20 million people in the Congo. And this is without even pointing out the glaring counter-examples of World Wars I and II. Christians have been murdering Christians, Jews, Muslims and Buddhists (if I'm leaving anyone out, I beg pardon) for ages, as have most other peoples. But our side has a particularly wide-ranging and long-lasting history of it. And the vast majority of that history (if we're going by body count) happened after the Thirty Years War.

So, given these counter examples, what exactly is the upside of a civil war in Iraq? Might it be possible that we don't live in the best of all possible worlds, and that the neocons' game of remaking the globe is just gonna end up with potentially millions dead for no good reason? Cause that does happen sometimes: people die for no good reason, and angels do not come down to save us from our own mistakes.

Sistani didn't want to take care of Muqty and now he's paying for it.

Oh, and SandyPat? Pay more attention. Sistani is right now creating his own militia while Sadr calls for unity and cooperation. Sadr's making a play for leadership, and it might pay off. Honestly, if we're gonna choose a side, his is the side to choose. He has credentials in the Sunni and Shiite communities, and he's about the only guy who does in Iraq. Of course, his credentials are that he's unifying Iraq against US, so that doesn't really do us a lot of good. But either way, you're pretty wrong on this one.

Sick.

Nice to see that somebody doesn't go all mushy at the thought of horrific human suffering.

As the black marketeer says to his friend, from atop the ferris wheel, what difference does it really make if one of those dots on the ground stops moving.

It's all about altitude, baby. From a sufficient height, the torture-to-death of your mother, wife, and child mean nothing.

Keep those elevated thoughts coming, Stephen.