I don't like it, but accept that there is probably a need for some sort of amnesty for at least a portion of the Sunni insurgents in Iraq -- even if they killed American troops.

Charles Krauthammer sums up my position nicely.

Our objective in any war is not revenge but success. Confederate soldiers who swore allegiance to the United States were pardoned after the Civil War, even those who had killed Union soldiers. We gave amnesty to legions of Japanese and Germans who'd killed thousands of Americans in World War II.

And those amnesties were granted after total victory. In conflicts in which there is no unconditional surrender -- civil strife that ends far more ambiguously, as in El Salvador and Chile, for example -- amnesty and reconciliation are the essential elements for the establishment of a stable, democratic peace.

In Iraq, amnesty will necessarily be part of any co-optation strategy in which insurgents lay down their arms. And it would not apply to the foreign jihadists, who, unlike the Sunni insurgents who would join the new Iraq, dream of an Islamic state built on the ruins of the current order. There is nothing to discuss with such people. The only way to defeat them is to kill them, as we did Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.

But killing them requires depriving them of their sanctuary. Reconciliation-cum-amnesty gets disaffected Iraqi Sunni tribes to come over to the government's side, drying up the sea in which the jihadists swim. After all, we found Zarqawi in heavily Sunni territory by means of intelligence given to us by local Iraqis.

Protests in America over the amnesty suggestion have caused both the administration and the Maliki government to backtrack. But don't believe it. Amnesty will be an essential element in any reconciliation policy. Which, in turn, is the only route to victory -- defined today just as it was on the first day of the war: leaving behind a self-sustaining post-Hussein government, both democratic and friendly to our interests. It is attainable. The posturing over amnesty can only make it more difficult.

There is a part of me that rebels against such clear and irrefutable logic. It is an angry, vengeful part of my psyche that wants every dead or wounded soldier avenged with the blood of those who did them harm. But I set that aside when I remember a statement my father, a career officer in the Navy, once made to me when I went through an adolescent peacenik phase that I know frustrated him -- "The ultimate goal of a war is a peace that everyone can live with."

If amnesty for those who killed Americans is an essential element of such a peace, then so be it.

Posted by: Greg at 12:21 PM | Comments (3) | Add Comment
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