http://www.prospect.org/web/page.ww?section=root&name=ViewWeb&articleId=8908
Of Mosul and Men
Stop wondering whether civil war will erupt in Iraq. It already has.
By Matthew Yglesias
11.30.04
For months now, skeptics of George W. Bush’s Iraq policy have been
warning that the present path could lead to bloody civil war.
More recently, proponents of a continued U.S. military presence have
been warning that bloody civil war would be the result of a
withdrawal.
Both sides can, perhaps, stop warning -- the civil war has already
begun.
Recent events in Mosul, a multi-ethnic city in northern Iraq that is
the country's third-largest after Baghdad and Basra, lack the
clear-cut structure of a Fort Sumter but otherwise bear all the
markings of ethnic and sectarian warfare.
Most news accounts portrayed the fighting in Mosul -- the result of an
insurgent counteroffensive in the wake of the American assault on
Fallujah -- as part of a conventional narrative of insurgents versus
combined U.S. and Interim Government forces.
The reality is rather more troubling.
The town's 5,000-strong police force, commanded by and largely
composed of Sunni Arabs, melted away in the face of the Sunni Arab
insurgency, with some policemen going over to the other side.
Peter Galbraith, reporting for the December issue of the Prospect
before fighting broke out, noted that the leadership of the Mosul
police department was widely believed to be collaborating with the
insurgency, and that the city's Kurdish community had already for this
reason created parallel governance and security institutions for the
neighborhoods in which they reside.
When American forces entered the city to retake it from the
insurgency, the Iraqi forces at their side were, in turn, Kurdish
peshmerga fighters brought in from the surrounding area.
The fight, in other words, was not between an American-backed
government and anti-government rebels.
It was, rather, a simple fight between Sunni Arabs and Kurds with
ostensible agents of the Interim Government on both sides.
Rather than unique to Mosul, the situation seems rather typical of
events throughout Iraq.
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Now, I ask you, who could have foreseen that? Not the Bushies, of
course. They've got their heads up their asses, while Americans troops
die each day.
Harry
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