What's past is prologue

In Iraq, the attacks, the accusations of guilt, and the declarations of progress all mount and the blood continues to flow. Take any day's news, multiply by the number of days that pass, and you have the story.

BBC, December 14:

A suicide car bomb attack on a checkpoint near Baghdad's government and diplomatic compound has injured at least 12 people, Iraqi medics say.

Reports suggest a member of Iraq's National Guard died along with the bomber, who struck a day after a similar blast killed seven nearby.

Militants also killed at least two Iraqi policemen when they ambushed a convoy just south of Baghdad. ...

As with Monday's attack, the victims were national guardsmen and Iraqi civilians travelling to work inside the Green Zone during the morning rush-hour.

AP, December 14:

U.S. troops discovered eight more bodies in the restive northern Iraqi city of Mosul, bringing the number of bodies found there since Nov. 10 to more than 150, the U.S. military said Tuesday.

Initially peaceful after the U.S.-led invasion in Iraq, Mosul has become a worrisome trouble spot since the American and Iraqi militaries invaded the insurgent stronghold of Fallujah in November. Soon after, Mosul witnessed an uprising that saw militants overpowering police, looting or burning police stations.

Since then, police say insurgents have been targeting security forces and police there in a bid to strengthen their grip. U.S. military spokesman Lt. Col. Paul Hastings said the number of bodies found so far was more than 150, though it wasn't known if all were affiliated with the police or Iraqi National Guard.

AP, December 15:

A bomb targeting a prominent Shiite cleric killed seven people outside one of southern Iraq's holiest shrines Wednesday....

The attack in the heartland of Iraqi's majority Shiite population wounded the cleric, Sheik Abdul Mahdi al-Karbalayee, and was a stark reminder of the risks for the six-week campaign leading to a Jan. 30 vote for a 275-member National Assembly. ...

In Fallujah, U.S. warplanes dropped nine bombs on insurgent positions in that Anbar provincial city, which American military commanders believed had been conquered after the bloody weeklong battle against insurgents based there last month.

As the Toronto Globe & Mail noted on Tuesday,

[t]he violence underlines the difficulties U.S.-led forces have encountered in the year since Mr. Hussein's ouster in trying to end a rampant insurgency. U.S. military commanders acknowledge they initially underestimated the strength of the insurgent backlash and say Iraqi security forces are not yet up to secure the country.

Or, as the BBC put it in an almost classic example of cliche British understatement,

[t]he continuing violence is a grim reminder that official US predictions of the insurgency's imminent demise after Saddam Hussein's capture in December last year are probably premature, analysts say.

Probably, indeed.

But as we scan over the fields of death marked with competing claims about the future, if we just count the dead and demolished and total up the bombings, we miss something: In talking about insurgents and attacks on Iraqi national guard and police, we sometimes make reference to Sunni insurgents - but we leave out, because we usually don't think about it, how much of the national guard and police is Shiite.

The divide in Iraq is not only pro-government/anti-government, not just pro-US/anti-US. It is also ethnic. It is also religious. Increasingly, it has less to do with the occupation per se (although that is still the primary focus of opposition) and more to do with who will be dominant in Iraq. One overt sign of that came in the Globe & Mail's report that

Abu Musab al-Zarqawi's al-Qaeda in Iraq group claimed responsibility for [Tuesday's] bombing in a statement posted on an Islamic Internet website regularly used by militants.

"On this blessed day a lion from the (group's) Martyrs' Brigade has gone out to strike at a gathering of apostates and Americans in the Green Zone," the group said....

A·pos·tate: n., a disloyal person who betrays or deserts his cause or religion or political party or friend etc. Syn.: deserter, renegade, turncoat, recreant, ratter

The Hadith, considered an authoritative exposition of the meaning of the Qur'an (occupying much the same position in Islam that the Talmud does in Judaism), contains the statement "Kill whoever changes his religion" and Sharia, traditional Islamic law, prescribes the death penalty for male apostates and life imprisonment for females. While many Muslims do not hold to such a strict interpretation of law, the radical conservatives do. (In fact, apostasy was the crime for which Salman Rushdie was condemned by Ayatollah Khomeini.)

The point being that the meaning of calling those Iraqis working in the Green Zone "apostates" would by no means be lost on its intended targets: It marked them as deserving of death.

There have been many who have warned of the possibility of civil war in Iraq, I among them. Perhaps the most recent warning was revealed last week, with this particular version of the story coming from the Guardian (UK) for December 8:

The Bush administration's robust assertions that the situation in Iraq would improve with next month's elections were badly shaken yesterday with the leak of a gloomy end-of-tour cable from the departing CIA station chief in Baghdad.

The bleak assessment, reported in yesterday's New York Times, warned that Iraq would descend even deeper into violent chaos unless the government was able to assert its authority and deliver concrete economic improvements. ...

The classified assessment was sent to CIA headquarters in Virginia late last month as the officer ended a year-long tour in Iraq. It was bolstered by a similar assessment from a second CIA officer, Michael Kostiw, who serves as a senior adviser to the agency chief, Porter Goss.

The outlook offered by the station chief echoes several similar warnings from officials in Washington and Baghdad. An intelligence estimate prepared for the White House last August said that Iraq's security situation could remain tenuous at best until the end of 2005, and warned the country was at risk of civil war.

But is "risk" actually the right word? A week ago Sunday, before that report was revealed, Edward Wong, writing the in New York Times, dared to speak the unspeakable.

Common wisdom holds that if American troops withdraw anytime soon, Iraq will descend into civil war, as Lebanon did in the late 1970's. But that ignores a question posed by events of recent weeks:

Has a civil war already begun?

Iraq is no Lebanon yet. But evidence is building that it is at least in the early stages of ethnic and sectarian warfare.

Among the points Wong makes is that increasingly, the violence by the insurgents is directed against fellow Iraqis and that

fighting is generally defined by ethnic and religious divisions: rebellious Sunni Arabs clashing with Shiite Arabs and Kurds. ...

Assaults by Iraqis on other Iraqis have taken grisly and audacious turns lately. In October, insurgents dressed as policemen waylaid three minibuses carrying 49 freshly trained Iraqi Army soldiers - most or all of them Shiites traveling south on leave - and executed them. Pilgrims going south to the Shiite holy cities of Najaf and Karbala have also been gunned down.

Shiite leaders in Basra have now organized the Anger Brigades, comprised of hundreds of Shiites whose avowed targets are not US forces or anyone else to do with the occupation, but radical Sunni Arabs.

"The Wahhabis and Salafis have come together to harm fellow Muslims and have begun killing anyone affiliated with the Shiite sect," Dhia al-Mahdi, the leader of the Anger Brigades, said in a written statement. "The Anger Brigades will be dispatched to those areas where these germs are, and there will be battles."

One telling point Wong makes about the changing nature of the war on the ground, and one as far as I'm aware overlooked elsewhere, is the silence of Shiites, even radical ones, about the assault on Fallujah. When the US attacked the city the first time, Shiites sprang to help, sending assistance to the city; some even went to fight alongside their "Sunni brothers." Moqtada al-Sadr said that the uprising he lead was in solidarity with the fighters in Fallujah and there were signs of an emerging Sunni-Shiite anti-occupation alliance.

This time, silence. There were no mass protests in Shiite areas and neither al-Sadr nor Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani was heard to condemn the attack. Fallujah was on its own. Despite having said as recently as mid-October that "he was ready to assist the mujahideen of Fallujah, and would interfere to keep the city safe" (as reported by the London-based Arabic daily Azzaman), when the assault finally came, al-Sadr was nowhere to be found. In fact, the only thing heard from him of late was a waffling statement about the January elections, as reported by AP on Monday:

Rebel Shi'ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, whose Mehdi Army militia clashed with U.S. forces this year, is not running but some of his loyalists are standing, ostensibly as independents.

"The Sadr movement will not take part in the upcoming electoral process but will not boycott the elections either," said Sadr spokesman Abdel Hadi al-Darraji. "It is up to the individual whether he believes the elections have integrity."

The fact that the attack on Fallujah did not "break the back of the resistance" is irrelevant here, as are the renewed fighting there and the spread of violence to previously-quiet areas. What matters is that the sides are lining up differently than they did just a few months ago. Wong quotes James Fearon, a professor of political science at Stanford University, as calling the situation a "civil-war-in-the-making." Even more tellingly, but perhaps without even realizing its weight, Wong says

American officials pin their hope of ultimately bringing peace to Iraq on the success of the January elections and the formation of an elected government, and they do not think a full-scale civil war is inevitable.

I first raised the possibility of Iraq ultimately dissolving into civil war almost a year ago, on January 22, a few days before it was revealed that the CIA had fears along the same lines. The fearsome fact that after a year of "progress" and "advances" and the arrangement of the fabled finality of elections, after the scores of billions of dollars, after the thousands of lives, after the gallons of blood, the best US officials can say is that a civil war is "not inevitable" says more than pages of analysis and commentary could.