May 4, 2007
Someone Else’s Civil War Posted by Fredric Smoler at 12:05 AM EST Some modern newspapers, including both The New York Times and the Guardian, have added a feature for the online reader, one copied from blogs: at the end of opinion columns the reader can add a comment, or scroll through the comments added by previous readers. This is an example of the democratizing power of the Internet—anyone adding a comment can reach a fair number of other readers—and at its best the effect is immensely impressive. In the blogs the added comments feature is a remarkably efficient mechanism for pooling information, because the collective intellectual resources of even a rather small readership are staggering when compared to the breadth of any single author. At its worst, in the case of heated comments appended to pure opinion columns, something more dispiriting can occur, a cascade of repetitive cliché and invective. But it now occurs to me that this sort of writing has a peculiar value of its own, for it is the very repetition that sometimes lets a reader spot an emerging cliché, and ponder it. Here’s one example: Columns on the fight over funding U.S. troops in Iraq have begun to elicit very easy certainties about the manifest idiocy of intervening in a civil war. Reading through a list of comments appended to a recent Times column, it suddenly occurred to me that while there may be good reasons to set a deadline for the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq, it is by no means obvious that we need such a deadline simply because Iraq has descended into civil war. Only after hearing for the thousandth time that we had to withdraw from Iraq for this reason alone did I begin to wonder what makes intervention in civil wars so obviously wrong. Is it that such interventions are doomed to defeat? That can’t be right, because they clearly aren’t. Most civil wars have winners, and as often as not interventionists pick the winning side. Hitler and Mussolini backed Franco, who won. That may not have done either Hitler or Mussolini much good, and there is evidence that it did the latter some harm, but not, I think, because he’d intervened in a civil war. Mussolini’s war on Abyssinia also did him some harm, as did his war on Greece, and neither of those was a civil war; Mussolini was an idiot to fight anywhere. The United States intervened in the civil war in Korea, and we secured at worst a draw. Would anyone be better off if all of Korea were now Communist? How about the Greek civil war? The U.S. sent money, weapons, and advisers, helping avert a Stalinist victory in Greece, for which some Greeks have not yet forgiven us, but both the Greeks and the Americans are pretty obviously better off because of that intervention. The French once intervened in what was in many senses a British civil war, the one known as the American Revolution. They backed the winner, and in the long run France did well out of its investment. There may have been blowback by way of encouraging their own revolutionaries, but after a while the investment paid off with a lot of young fellows shouting “Lafayette, we are here!” My father actually heard someone say that while going into combat in 1944, apparently unaware that he was actually in Belgium, but France clearly made out pretty well on the strength of the sentiment so expressed. How about cases where the U.S. failed to intervene in a civil war? Rwanda comes to mind, and in retrospect we are very properly ashamed of our hesitance. We were very chary about intervening in the civil war in Bosnia, and we ought to be more ashamed about that tardiness than is the fashion at this moment—because when we finally did intervene, the horrors there stopped very quickly. Destroying Saddam Hussein did produce an extremely cruel and many-sided Iraqi civil war. It is not so obvious that having produced that civil war, abandoning the Iraqis is the only ethical response to their tragedy. Assume, however, that the United States does precisely that, and the Iranians then intervene, and back a winner—one of the Shiite factions—and produce a satellite state wholly dependent on their continuing assistance. That outcome may not be entirely likely, but it is proclaimed as very likely by some of the people who are most certain that we are fools to continue to intervene in what has become a civil war, and who tell us that by destroying Saddam we have only expanded the Iranian empire. If those critics are right, and Iraq becomes an Iranian puppet regime, will the Iranians, too, have been fools to have intervened in a civil war? Possibly. But not, alas, certainly.
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