Maybe Bush will pardon Saddam Hussein

November 25, 2006
No One to Lose To
By MAUREEN DOWD
(a ukethanks to Phyll)


Washington - After the Thanksgiving Day Massacre
of Shiites by Sunnis, President Bush should go on
Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News and give an interview
headlined: “If I did it,here’s how the civil war in Iraq
happened.”

He could describe, hypothetically, a series of naïve,
arrogant and self-defeating blunders, including his
team’s failure to comprehend that in the Arab world,
revenge and religious zealotry can be stronger
compulsions than democracy and prosperity.

But W. is not yet able to view his actions in subjunctive
terms, much less objective ones. Bush family retainers
are working to deprogram him, but the president is
loath to strip off his delusions of adequacy.

W. declined to tear himself away from his free-range
turkey and pumpkin moussetrifle at Camp David and
reassure Americans about the deadliest sectarian attack
in Baghdad since the U.S. invaded. More than 200
Shiites were killed and hundreds more wounded by car
bombs and a mortar attack in Sadr City. October was
the bloodiest month yet for civilians, and in the last
four months, some 13,000 men, women and children have died.

American helicopters and Iraqi troops did not arrive
for two hours after Sunni gunmen began a siege on
the Health Ministry controlled by the Shiite cleric
Moktada al-Sadr, who has a militia that kills Sunnis
and is married to the Maliki government.

Continuing the cycle of revenge yesterday, Shiite
militiamen threw kerosene on six Sunnis and set
them on fire, as Iraqi soldiers watched, and killed 19 more.

The New York Times and other news outlets have been
figuring out if it’s time to break with the
administration’s use of euphemisms like “sectarian
conflict.” How long can you have an ever-descending
descent without actually reaching the civil war?

Some analysts are calling it genocide or clash of
civilizations, arguing that civil war is too genteel
a term for the butchery that is destroying a nation
before our very eyes. Anthony Shadid, The Washington
Post reporter who won a Pulitzer Prize for his Iraq
coverage, went back recently and described “the
final, frenzied maturity of once-inchoate forces
unleashed more than three years ago by the invasion.
There was civil-war-style sectarian killing, its echoes in
Lebanon a generation ago. Alongside it were gangland
turf battles over money,power and survival; a raft of
political parties and their militias fighting a
zero-sum game; a raging insurgency; the collapse of
authority; social services a chimera; and no way
forward for an Iraqi government ordered to act by
Americans who themselves are still seen as the final
arbiter and, as a result, still depriving that government
of legitimacy. Civil war was perhaps too easy a term,
a little too tidy.”

It will be harder to sell Congress on the idea that
America’s troops should be in the middle of somebody
else’s civil war than to convince them that we need to
hang tough in the so-called front line of the so-called
war on terror against Al Qaeda.

With Iraq splitting, Tony Snow indulges in the
ludicrous exercise of hair-splitting. He said that
in past civil wars, “people break up into clearly
identifiable feuding sides clashing for supremacy.”
In Iraq, “you do have a lot of different forces that
are trying to put pressure on the government and
trying to undermine it. But it’s not clear that they
are operating as a unified force.” But Lebanon was
a shambles with multiple factions, and everybody
called that a civil war.

Mr. Snow has said this is not a civil war because the
fighting is not taking place in every province and
because Iraqis voted in free elections. But that’s
like saying that the Battle of Gettysburg only took
place in one small corner of the country, so there
was no real American Civil War. And there were
elections during our civil war too. President Lincoln
was re-elected months before the war’s end.

The president’s comparison to how Vietnam turned out
a generation later, his happy talk that Iraq is going to
be fine, is preposterous.

As Neil Sheehan, a former Times reporter in Vietnam
who wrote the PulitzerPrize-winning “A Bright Shining
Lie,” told me: “In Vietnam, there were just two sides
to the civil war. You had a government in Hanoi with a
structure of command and an army and a guerrilla
movement that would obey what they were told
to do. So you had law and order in Saigon immediately
after the war ended. In Iraq, there’s no one like that for
us to lose to and then do business with.”

The questions are no longer whether there’s a civil
war or whether we can achieve a military victory. The
only question is, who can we turn the country
over to?

At the moment, that would be no one.