A Proxy War, Not A Civil War
This editorial in the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review states more eloquently a point I was trying to make yesterday:
The Bush administration disputes the “civil war” moniker. And it’s not a semantic argument. Just Tuesday, The New York Times reported that “the Iranian-backed group Hezbollah had been training members of the Mahdi Army, the Iraqi Shiite militias led by Moktada al-Sadr.” It’s not the only outside influence.
Such a proxy war is not a civil war. Neither is it unreasonable or naive to believe that sans those proxies, Iraq might not be the hellhole it now is.
The editorial concludes that we should still withdraw and leave Iraq to sort the matter out, but I disagree with that. The war in Iraq is a proxy war, as opposed to a civil war, but we must remember that we are one of the proxies. The rogue, terror-sponsoring states like Iran and Syria are the other proxies, as well as international terror groups like al Qaeda and Hezbollah, and unless we’d like to hand those groups and nations a victory in this proxy war we must remain in Iraq to complete the mission.
I posted earlier about a government report which indicates that international Islamic extremists and raising possibly as much as $200 million/year to fight against the Iraqi government and U.S. forces in Iraq. If that doesn’t make Iraq a front in the war on terror I don’t know what does, nor do I see the wisdom in abandoning Iraqis by themselves to deal with the international terror groups and rogue states that would see their representative government toppled.
