Jonah Goldberg points out that there often are “good guys” and “bad guys” in a civil war – and that the argument that Iraq is a civil war is not a compelling one for adopting a cut-&-run-&-surrender policy as advocated by the neo-Copperheads.

Why is it obvious that intervening in a civil war is not only wrong, but so self-evidently wrong that merely calling the Iraqi conflict a civil war closes off discussion?

Surely it canÂ’t be a moral argument. Every liberal foreign policy do-gooder in Christendom wants America to interject itself in the Sudanese civil war unfolding so horrifically in Darfur. The high-water mark in post-Vietnam liberal foreign policy was Bill ClintonÂ’s intervention in the Yugoslavian civil war. If we can violate the prime directive of no civil wars for Darfur and Kosovo, why not for Kirkuk and Basra?

If your answer is that those calls for intervention were “humanitarian,” that just confuses me more. Advocates of a pullout mostly concede that Iraq will become a genocidal, humanitarian disaster if we leave. Is the prospect of Iraqi genocide more tolerable for some reason?

Indeed, there is no way one can argue that intervention in Kosovo or Darfur are defensible while intervention in Iraq is not. For that matter, many folks still struggle mightily over our failure to intervene in the brief and bloody events in Rwanda, which can also be argued constituted a civil war. I fail to see the moral calculus that would allow for intervening to stop genocide while not doing so in an effort to forestall such genocide.

Then there are those who take the fatalistÂ’s cop-out: Civil wars have no good guys and bad guys. TheyÂ’re just dogfights, and we should stay out of them and see who comes out on top. But thatÂ’s also confusing, because not only is it not true, liberals have been saying the opposite for generations. They cheered for the Reds against the Whites in the Russian civil war, for the Communists against the Fascists in the Spanish civil war, and for the victims of ethnic cleansing in Yugoslavia and Sudan. Surely liberals believe there was a good side and a bad side in the American Civil War?

Indeed, most civil wars do, in fact, have an identifiable dichotomy of “good guy” and “bad guy”, to use Goldberg’s simplistic terms. With the benefit of hindsight, it is clear that the world would have been a better place had the Whites won in Russia. Knowing what we do about Communist regimes, one can reluctantly conclude that the better of two sides won in Spain. And would anyone argue that a Serbian victory in Yugoslavia or an Islamist victory in Sudan and their accompanying genocides would be better for America or the world? Would one seriously argue that a Confederate victory over the Union would have been a neutral outcome?

In the end, America has an interest in who wins in Iraq – as do the Iraqi people. It is strategically, not to mention morally, imperative for us to act in the best interests of our nation and the Iraqi people – and to reject the defeatist cries of the nay-sayers who invoke the phrase “civil war” as if it were a magic talisman.

Posted by: Greg at 12:29 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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