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Preface
- Brookings Institution Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
With each passing day, Iraq sinks deeper into the abyss of civil war. The history of such wars is that they are disastrous for all involved. Asking who won most civil wars is a bit like asking who “won” the San Francisco earthquake. Unfortunately , we may soon be forced to confront how best we can avoid “losing” an Iraqi civil war. Starting to answer that question is the purpose of this study. We hope that the leaders of the United States and Iraq will find a way to stop what seems to be an irrevocable slide into an allout civil war. Given their repeated failures to do so, and how badly the situation had deteriorated by the time this report went to press, however, we believe that the United States and its allies must begin thinking about how to deal with the consequences of massive failure in Iraq. During the course of the research for this study, one ominous fact that loomed large from history was that in previous civil wars there seemed to be a “point of no return”—a moment when the psychological forces propelling civil war became irreversible—but that moment was never apparent to the participants themselves. Historians looking back on a conflict could Preface vii 1379-1 ch0 frontmatter 4/16/07 3:11 PM Page vii often agree on when that point was reached, but at the time those caught up in the struggle typically believed that solutions and alternative paths were still available long after they had been overtaken by events. This should sober us to the possibility that it may already be too late to save Iraq.While we want to believe that an all-out civil war can still be averted, albeit if only through Herculean exertions on the part of Washington and Baghdad, the warnings of history suggest that perhaps we too are simply repeating the same mistakes of those caught up in past civil wars. When we began this study in the spring of 2006, we made a list of indicators of when a state in civil strife passes such a point of no return. We watched with dismay as the situation in Iraq worsened and indicator after indicator went from our drawing board to Iraq’s daily reality (these indicators are contained in Appendix F). With this in mind, we set out to mine the history of recent similar internecine conflicts for lessons that might help the United States to devise a set of strategies to deal with the looming prospect of a full-scale Iraqi civil war. We scrutinized the history of civil wars in Lebanon in the 1970s and 1980s; Afghanistan, Bosnia, Chechnya, Croatia, Georgia, Kosovo, Macedonia, the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, and Tajikistan during the 1990s; as well as the conflicts in Congo and Somalia that rage to this day (we present eight of these cases in five appendices to the paper to provide additional historical insight for readers wishing to delve deeper into this question themselves). From these wars we distilled a set of lessons regarding how civil wars can affect the interests of other countries, even distant ones like the United States, and then used those lessons to fashion a set of recommendations for how Washington might begin to develop a new strategy for an Iraq caught up in all-out civil war. In doing so, we attempted to set aside our own feelings of sympathy and concern for the Iraqi people themselves. The only thing that the United States can do to help them is to prevent the descent into full-scale civil war. Once it has happened, the United States will have failed them; and this selfsame history makes frighteningly clear that it is impossible for well-meaning outsiders to limit the humanitarian tragedies of an all-out civil war, unless they are willing to intervene massively to bring it to an end.We note that the commitments needed to end such a war are effectively the same resources the United States and its allies are unwilling to commit today to prevent its outviii preface 1379-1 ch0 frontmatter 4/16/07 3:11 PM Page viii [3.91.106.157] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 08:19 GMT) break. Consequently, we felt that we had to look past the tragedy that will be visited upon the Iraqi people (for whose sake the United States nominally launched the invasion in 2003), and instead consider how such a civil war could affect U...