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February 03, 2007

Laying Blame

I'm late to the game on Charles Krauthammer's latest, but I just can't let it pass without comment. For those who haven't read it, Krauthammer's argument is that the civil war in Iraq isn't the fault of the U.S., that the U.S. offered Iraq a shot at freedom and they chose civil war. While that does have some elements of truth to it, It's a remarkably convenient argument for those who supported the war to explain why things have gone so wrong in Iraq.

Iraq, like a lot of Third World countries, exists in no small part thanks to colonialism. For centuries the European powers divvied up the world based on what they could grab, regardless of what the locals wanted. The world has been dealing with the problems resulting from that practice ever since. For comparison's sake, Europe's boundaries, with some exceptions, have come about over time from a combination of demographics and geography. Similar people have, by and large, ended up living together. Thanks to colonialism, much of Asia and Africa is instead divided along arbitrary lines created by outside powers with little to no concern for the facts on the ground. Iraq is a textbook example of this, a country that includes three major ethnic groups plus some Turkomens and others about the fringe. These groups were forced together and left to work out their own differences. The result should have been quite predictable, especially for Americans.

When the United States came into being, it was divided by the institution of slavery. America leaders struggled for some eighty years to reconcile their differences peacefully. America's two founding documents, the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, were both tainted by the need to compromise on slavery. Even as the country expanded, each new generation had to deal with the problems of slavery, for each side recognized the delicate balance of power that existed between them. The South feared, possibly rightly, that if the North was able to gain control of the federal government, they would use that power to abolish slavery. In order to protect their 'peculiar institution,' the South continually pushed to ensure that enough new states were slave states to protect their interests. When Abraham Lincoln managed a narrow victory in the election of 1860, his party's base of abolitionists and his own former words convinced the South that the moment they feared had arrived. To avoid seeing the federal government destroy slavery, the South seceded, putting in motion the very events they hoped to avoid.

Republican government is a terrific invention, but one of it's biggest flaws is that people tend to be wary of what may happen when the other side takes power. What other side? There's always another side. I think it's just human nature. Even in our own relatively stable U.S.A., the rhetoric regarding what will happen if the Democrats/Republicans take power would be funny if it weren't taken so seriously. In someplace like Iraq, where the level of trust makes the U.S. look like paradise, republican government really might be a threat to some elements of Iraq. You've got three big groups, all of whom have different goals and whose goals conflict in ways they cannot be reconciled through compromise. Which, just like slavery, is a recipe for civil war.

We knew all that going in, although a lot of us failed to put all the pieces together. Saddam Hussein, for all his faults, was keeping the Iraqis from making war on one another. But the conflict was still there, however suppressed, and when Hussein was removed, the conflict had a chance to be resolved. Maybe we could have found a way to get the Iraqis to work out their differences peacefully, had we maintained order and kept a tight lid on things while we were helping them build a new government. But we didn't, and at this point, so much blood has been spilled I suspect that the only way Iraq is going to resolve its differences is through a war. That may have been inevitable; when Hussein died, this all might have happened anyhow. But we removed Hussein, and failed to replace him with a government that could either prevent the violence from occurring or working out the underlying problems of Iraq. So pretending that all this isn't our fault, while perhaps comforting to those whose intentions were pure, elides our responsibility for the disaster and, perhaps worse, allows people to think that it might be a good idea to try something like this again.

I've noted many times that I'm not overly interested in affixing blame, and I stand by that. I am far more interested in finding ways to fix problems than in pointing fingers at who got us into the problems. But understanding how we got where we are is rather important if we're to avoid similar mistakes in the future, and Krauthammer's attempt to blame the Iraqi people for what has occurred in Iraq without admitting that the U.S. had a hand in the problem as well will just lead to us making the same mistake again.