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Associated Press
May 10, 2006
By Robin Hindery
Iraq is embroiled in a "low-level civil war" that is forcing the United States to react to events on the ground rather than shape them, according to a former U.S. military adviser who spent two years there studying the insurgency.
"Once you start reacting to events, you cannot impose a solution," said Ahmed Hashim, a professor at the Naval War College who worked with U.S. troops in Iraq from November 2003 to September 2005 in an effort to understand the emotions and loyalties driving Iraq's insurgents. "You go along with the flow."
Speaking at the Council on Foreign Relations on Tuesday, Hashim said the most powerful force behind Iraq's chaotic downward spiral in recent months is "the identity issue" dividing Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds.
"What's happened over the past several months is that Iraqi communities have created a narrative of one another that is exclusionary," he said, pointing to the rise of sectarian militias such as the Mahdi Army, the powerful militia loyal to radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr.
When militias take the place of the state in protecting individual communities, he said, ethnic antagonism is the natural byproduct.
Stressing that he was speaking as an individual, not a representative of the U.S. Military, Hashim expressed pessimism over the U.S.'s ability to control the current situation in Iraq.
"We have a civil war right now, a low-level civil war," he said. "Our understanding of Iraq has advanced at a very glacial pace, and the only policy we really have in our hand right now...is to leave."
The counterinsurgency strategies the U.S. has been implementing so far may not be effective tools for dealing with a civil war or organized crime, he added.
"To stay in Iraq and to affect the situation in Iraq will require a kind of understanding at a level far deeper than we have," he said.
Hashim said he was struck by the shift in the attitudes of ordinary Iraqi civilians over the course of his time there. In 2003, most Iraqis he spoke to did not consider civil war a possibility, he said; two years later, all that had changed.
"In 2005 I came back with a fully pessimistic and bleak view of Iraq," he said, adding that the cycle of sectarian violence seems only to have accelerated since then. "The narratives they've created about each other are propelling them."
Hashim's statements came on a day when at least 41 people were killed across Iraq, according to an Associated Press tally, including at least 17 in a suicide bombing late Tuesday at a market in Tal Afar.
Copyright © 2006 The Associated Press
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