The View From 10,000 Miles Is Better

Today Condi Rice went on ABC's This Week and made what I consider to be the signature statement about how the neocon chickenhawks in the White House view war.

George Stephanopoulos confronted her with Tom Lasseter's article from McClatchy Newspapers. Lasseter has been on the ground in Iraq for a long, long time, and he consistently provides some of the best reporting from the region. This piece in question confirms what we've all been suspecting, that the Shiites and Sunnis are RIGHT NOW engaged in a civil war, according to the people best informed to make that decision: the soldiers that confront them every day:

While American politicians and generals in Washington discuss the possibility of civil war in Iraq, many U.S. officers and enlisted men who patrol Baghdad say it already has begun.

Army troops in and around the capital interviewed in the past week cite a long list of evidence that the center of the nation is coming undone: Villages have been abandoned by Sunni and Shiite Muslims; Sunni insurgents have killed thousands of Shiites in car bombings and assassinations; Shiite militia death squads have tortured and killed hundreds, if not thousands, of Sunnis; and, when night falls, neighborhoods become open battlegrounds.

"There's one street that's the dividing line. They shoot mortars across the line and abduct people back and forth," said 1st Lt. Brian Johnson, a 4th Infantry Division platoon leader from Houston. Johnson, 24, was describing the nightly violence that pits Sunni gunmen from Baghdad's Ghazaliyah neighborhood against Shiite gunmen from the nearby Shula district.

The bodies of captured Sunni and Shiite fighters turn up in the morning, dropped in canals and left on the side of the road.

Higher-ranking U.S. officers concede that developments are threatening to move beyond their grasp.

"There's no plan — we are constantly reacting," said a senior military official who spoke on the condition of anonymity. "I have absolutely no idea what we're going to do." [...]

"This is a civil war," said a senior adviser to the commander of the Iraqi Army's 6th Division, which oversees much of Baghdad. "The problem between Sunnis and Shiites is a religious one, and it gets worse every time they attack each other's mosques.

"Iraq is now caught in hell." [...]

Osborne, 39, of Decatur, Ill., compared Iraq to Rwanda, where hundreds of thousands of people were killed in an orgy of intertribal violence in 1994. "That was without doubt a civil war — the same thing is happening here.

"But it's not called a civil war — there's such a negative connotation to that word and it suggests failure," he said.

That's a liberal quotation, but it's still worth reading the whole article to get a sense of what the troops on the ground think about the widening sectarian violence right in front of their eyes.

So Stephanopoulos reads a passage of this article to the Secretary of State. He actually highlighted this quote:

"It's to the point of being irreconcilable; you know, we've found a lot of bodies, entire villages have been cleared out, we get reports of entire markets being gunned down," said (Staff Sgt. Wesley) Ramon, "and if that's not a marker of a civil war, I don't know what is."

And then he asks:

CR: Well, first of all, again, it is a hypothetical, and I'm not going to comment on a hypothetical. The US troops are there to support a unity government, and unified security forces. And that is what they're doing, and that's what they're doing all day. I'm certain that if you're on the ground in the midst of sometimes terrible violence, that it's difficult to see the larger political process that is underway. I don't doubt the sincerity of the sergeant who spoke in that way. But I know what the Iraqi government and the great majority of the Iraqi people are doing. And they are trying to build a unified Iraq.

Boy, it must be nice to see the whole picture of Iraq from your briefing room. I know those philistines out in the field can't possibly fathom what it is you in the ivory towers of State and Defense are up to. They just have to see Sunni bodies dumped in ditches, gun battles that last all night, mortar attacks between rival factions. They can't understand the purity and goodness and sweetness and light of this Democracy Project (TM)!

Maybe if Ms. Rice, or anyone in this Bush Administration, were in the foxhole, or had ever been in the foxhole, or had any member of their family or indeed anyone they ever knew in the foxhole, then MAYBE, they wouldn't be blinded by the self-deluded righteousness of their cause and look at reality as it is. What the Secretary of State is saying is that reality doesn't tell the whole story. Facts are meaningless. War is not something to be fought but to be strategized and given over to history.

Then she said, as proof that the Sunnis and Shiites are just hunky-dory, that "the South has not walked out of the Senate and declared civil war," because, you know, as long as the dysfunctional central government is united in not doing anything about the wholesale slaughter and the ethnic cleansing in their cities, then everything's peachy.

This serves as the ultimate chickenhawk statement, if you ask me. After all, the view from 10,000 miles away is always better than the view from up close.