REQUIEM FOR AMERICA
PART 1 of 3

By Joe Kress

NewsWithViews.com

The drum beat of another war in the making simultaneously with the loss of the on-going Iraq non-war war was predict-ted by two authors in the magazine Foreign Affairs. The articles are in its March/April 2006 issue. Foreign Affairs is the major outlet for articles approved by the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR).

Stephen Biddle’s article Seeing Baghdad, Thinking Saigon and The Last Exit From Iraq by Joel Rayburn, Major, USA, sends the message through the Foreign Affairs magazine that it’s time to abandon the democratization of Mesopotamia.

Steve Brittle convincingly relates the experiences of our diplomats, military and political… all trying to win a war by duplicating major blunders that caused us to abandon Vietnam to the communist North Vietnamese.

To quote the crux of Brittle’s conclusion that the U.S. must immediately get out of this civil war is explained herein:

“…people’s wars are wars of ideas as much as they are killing competitions – and nationalism is often at the heart of the program. Insurgents’ frame their resistance as an expression of the people’s sovereign will to overthrow an illegitimate regime that represents only narrow class interests or is backed by a foreign government.



“Communal civil wars, in contrast, feature opposing sub-national groups divides along ethnic or sectarian lines; they are not about universal class interests or national passions. In such situations, even the government is typically an instrument of one communal group, and its opponents champion the rights of the subgroup over those of others. These conflicts do not revolve around ideas, because no pool of uncommitted citizens is waiting to be swayed by ideology. (Albanian Kosovars, Bosnian Muslims, and Rwandan Tutsis knew whose side they were on.) The fight is about group survival, not about the superiority of ones party’s ideology or one side’s ability to deliver better governance.

“Whereas the Vietnam War was a Maoist people’s war, Iraq is a communal civil war. This can be seen in the pattern of violence in Iraq, which strongly correlated with communal affiliation.

“In a people’s war, handing the fighting off to local forces makes sense because it undermines the nationalist component of insurgent resistance, improves the quality of local intelligence, and boosts troop strength. But in a communal civil war, it throws gasoline on the fire. Iraq’s Sunnis perceive the “nationalâ€