One prominent
senator declared: ``If the Congress voted right now, we would
vote to pull our troops out.'' Another warned against ``a vague,
open-ended, humanitarian mission, gradually taking sides against
an urban guerrilla force, having no exit strategy before you go
in, having troops on the ground before you've defined their mission,
and a series of ad hoc decisions...''
But the
president insisted that we should ``finish the work we set out
to do,'' and won praise from an official on the ground who declared:
``It would be a disaster if the United States pulled out now.''
All these
eerily contemporary comments came from an Oct. 10, 1993, broadcast
of ABC's ``This Week with David Brinkley.'' The participants were
reflecting on administration policy in Somalia a week after a
Black Hawk helicopter was shot down by rebel forces. 18 Americans
died in the incident. The senators were Phil Gramm and Bill Bradley,
the president was Bill Clinton, and the supportive comments came
from Adm. Jonathan Howe, the U.N. special envoy to Somalia.
There are
many flaws in comparisons between Somalia and Iraq, but one similarity
should not be forgotten. If the United States is not careful,
our troops will find themselves in the middle of a full-blown
Iraqi civil war that could make President Bush's talk about ``victory''
seem very hollow.
No one is
more aware of this than our military commanders, which is why
attention must be paid to comments last week by Lt. Gen. John
R. Vines to The New York Times, and to an important news
story by Jonathan Finer in The Washington Post.
Vines praised
the large turnout in Iraq's Dec. 15 elections, but noted that
the ``vote is reported to be primarily along sectarian lines,
which is not particularly heartening.'' The new government, he
said, ``must be a government by and for Iraqis, not sects.'' He
added: ``As the government forms, if we see indicators that there
are purges of competent people to be replaced with ideologues
in the security ministries, that would be disturbing. If competent
commanders were to be replaced by those whose main qualification
is an allegiance to a sect, that would be of concern to us.''
The importance
of that last sentence was brought home by Finer's Jan. 4 report
in the Post: ``Over the strong objections of U.S. commanders
in Baghdad, the Iraqi government has nominated a new leader for
a brigade that is set to assume control over some of the capital's
most sensitive areas.''
Why was
the American choice cast aside? ``U.S. commanders,'' Finer wrote,
``are concerned that the rejection of a qualified Sunni Muslim
candidate by a government that is dominated by the rival Shiite
Muslim majority will fuel perceptions of Iraq's security forces
as sectarian institutions, particularly in Sunni regions where
sympathy for the insurgency runs deep.''
The potential
for a full-scale civil war is closer than ever. The administration
presumably knows this, but the Bush team's record for anticipating
bad news is not encouraging. Paul Bremer, who led the U.S. civilian
authority in Iraq after the invasion, admitted on NBC's ``Dateline''
that ``we really didn't see the insurgency coming.'' If they missed
that, what else can they miss?
This administration
rarely pays attention to constructive criticism from the opposition
party. But somebody in the White House ought to listen to Sen.
Carl Levin, a Michigan Democrat who opposed the war but keeps
trying to help Bush find a way out of this mess.
Levin argues
that the United States' highest priority now is not simply to
create a broad coalition government in Iraq. America must use
its influence to push the Shiite majority to change provisions
in the recently adopted constitution in ways that will give the
minority Sunnis a bigger stake in the future. ``There's no military
solution in Iraq unless there is a political coming together in
Iraq,'' Levin said during an interview, offering words that should
be framed and hung somewhere in Bush's office. Without constitutional
changes, he added, ``there will be a civil war regardless of how
many troops we have there.''
Somalia
offers a sobering lesson of what can happen to American forces
when our government blunders into the middle of a civil war. We
dare not do it again. And we had better see the warning signs.
