Civil War Debate Deepens

I've heard the following question several times in the last week in various settings (one of them was a PolySci class...): Could civil war in Iraq ultimately be a good thing? Alan Stuart Carl has a piece about the "Meaning of Civil War" over at "Maverick Views" and touches on this subject.

I want to make my position on this very clear: a civil war in Iraq may be catastrophic for the entire region. People out there who essentially say, "if our side wins, a civil war could end well for the U.S." are incredibly naive. First of all, we don't have an actual side in Iraq. Our side, as our president has made clear, is "democracy" and "the march of freedom." Yeah...how's that workin' out for ya?

In other words, our side is abstract and our hands will be tied in a civil war. The foundation for a civil war in Iraq is strong and won't be broken with a "unity government." Civil war may very well be inevitable from this point on, no matter how successful we are in installing a Freedom-friendly government. It may have been inevitable from day 1 of the invasion--we removed the strongman (Saddam) that was keeping a lid on the sectarian tensions that have been brewing for centuries in Iraq (albeit in a disgusting, brutal way).

Furthermore, this is nothing new. Others have tried to impost democracy, or at least friendly governments, at the barrel of a gun. The lack of respect for, or perhaps the ignorance of, the history of not only Iraq but of international relations in general on the part of the Bush administration in disgusting and inexcusable. A relatively small degree of thought could have foreseen a likely post-invasion civil war in Iraq.

Finally, here's a simplified version of what could happen with a divisive civil war in Iraq: a disintegration of the Iraq that we know into Kurdistan in the north, a Shi'a state in the south, and a Sunni state in central Iraq. A Kurdish state in the north would piss of Turkey, a Shi'a state could ally with Iran, and a Sunni state could ally with its ethnic brethren, perhaps Syria. This scenario has been cited many times before. The significance of such a disintegration cannot be overstated - the entire region would be severely destabalized and we would have a much larger problem on our hands. Again, something that could have been foreseen with a minimal amount of thought...