Inside the Iraqi Abyss

By Robert Dreyfuss, TomPaine.com. Posted March 20, 2006.

The civil war that war opponents warned about, the one that Middle East experts said might be coming, the one that Bush administration officials say isn't likely to happen has already started. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad, the neoconservative strategist who served the United States in two failed occupations -- Afghanistan and Iraq -- still doesn't get it. In an interview with Al Hayat, a London-based Arabic newspaper, Khalilzad warned that Iraq "is bleeding and headed for civil war." But he's wrong. Iraq is no longer headed for civil war. It's there.

Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, looking grim at a Pentagon news conference on Monday, remains in denial. "Do I think we're in a civil war at the present time? No," he said. The Department of Defense is war-gaming a civil war, he told reporters. What would a civil war in Iraq look like? Well, said Rumsfeld, "I will say, I don't think it'll look like the United States Civil War."

Rumsfeld is right about that. It won't. But it will look a lot like the civil war that is being waged in Iraq today. And that one looks very much like the Lebanese civil war, the grinding, 1975-1990 conflict that left hundreds of thousands dead. To understand what the Iraqi civil war is, think Lebanon.

For a long time after the U.S. invasion of Iraq, it made sense to argue that the fighting in Iraq was not a civil war, but a Sunni-led insurgency against the U.S. occupation forces and the series of transitional, interim and "permanent" puppet governments supported by those U.S. forces. For a long while, the majority of those killed in Iraq were either combatants on one side of these battle lines or another, or they were civilian "collateral damage" killed by the United States or who died in spectacular car bombings and other terrorist acts carried out by Abu Musab Al Zarqawi's religious right. That is no longer the case.

Sometime over the past 12 months -- long before the demolition of the Golden Dome in Samarra -- that balance shifted dramatically. It might truly be said that the Iraq War became the Iraqi Civil War when the number of those killed in sectarian and ethnic clashes, in death squad activity and in assassinations, torture and executions surpassed the number killed in the war between the United States and the resistance. It's hard to say exactly when this happened, but it took place last summer, at least, and it has continued to this day.

John Pace, the former United Nations human rights chief in Iraq, might have been announcing the start of the Iraqi Civil War when he declared that as many as 1,000 dead Iraqis per month were turning up in morgues with obvious signs that they had been bound and gagged, tortured and executed. Pace, whose forthright declarations have not gotten the attention they deserve, said:

The Baghdad morgue received 1,100 bodies in July alone, about 900 of whom bore evidence of torture or summary execution. That continued throughout the year and last December there were 780 bodies, including 400 having gunshot wounds or wounds as those caused by electric drills.

Now the newspapers are beginning to report the carnage. Yesterday, there were widespread reports that 87 dead Iraqis were found in mass graves, in bloody vans, in heaps in the street, on Monday morning. But those 87 -- virtually all Sunnis, murdered by Shiite death squads run by pro-government militias -- are just the tip of the iceberg. Ellen Knickmeyer of The Washington Post, one of the very few reporters willing to look into the face of this horror, reported Tuesday that the Baghdad morgue sent 150 unclaimed bodies to be buried on Friday and 70 more on Monday. According to Knickmeyer, the Iraqi authorities are putting enormous pressure on morgue officials not to talk about the mass killings.

American military officials are openly admitting that the deaths from sectarian strife and militia killings have surpassed the insurgency as a threat to the security of ordinary Iraqis. That is not to say that the insurgency has lessened, only that the civil war slaughter has intensified.

Robert Dreyfuss is the author of "Devil's Game: How the United States Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam" (Henry Holt/Metropolitan Books).

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