Since President Bush announced that he would be sending in a "surge" of troops to stabilize the situation in Iraq, two important pieces of information have come out of that country: civilian casualty statistics being compiled by Iraq Body Count and the results of an annual Iraqi poll carried out by the BBC.
The proverbial "facts on the ground" should give both pro-war Republicans and anti-war Democrats time for pause.
For the anti-war left, facing up to reality means acknowledging that bringing American troops home precipitously is likely to result in civil war and genocide in Iraq. In the BBC poll, which included 2,212 respondents in 450 different locations across the country, only 35 percent of Iraqis said they wanted American forces to leave Iraq - with the remaining 65 percent preferring that the foreign troops remain until the security situation in their country is stabilized. This speaks to how terrified Iraqis are of what would happen if our troops were to simply pack up and leave, with no stable military force remaining in Iraq except for armed ethnic militias.
Certainly, it is Bush and the Republicans who will be held responsible for the ultimate outcome in Iraq - leaving anti-war protesters free to chant "bring the troops home" and let the other side take the blame for any bloodbath that could result. However, before rallying around these protesters, liberal Americans should ask themselves: Are we willing to watch on television while men, women and children are massacred in a full-blown ethnic civil war, a direct result of American military action?
Of course, the Catch-22 is that simply leaving our soldiers in harm's way will not guarantee that Iraq will become a stable country. That's why pro-war Republicans also need a wake-up call to reality - which for them means realizing that our president has no strategy for how to fix the fundamental problems in Iraq.
According to the BBC poll, a majority of Iraqis today lack confidence in their own government. This lack of public support, combined with a complete inability to stand on its own two legs without the U.S. military propping it up, would suggest that the third consecutive "national unity" government to be formed in Baghdad by our occupation has failed.
Iraq's Shi'a prime minister - Nouri al-Maliki - is deeply unpopular among Sunnis and Kurds, demonstrating that he is not in any way the type of leader who could lead Iraq beyond its ethnic impasse. His failure mirrors that of his predecessor, Ibrahim al-Jaafari. Jaafari's predecessor, the U.S.-appointed Iyad Allawi, only succeeded in unifying Iraqis against his own government. Indeed, it is difficult to imagine any leader who could rebuild unity in a deeply divided Iraqi society without using the tactics employed by Saddam Hussein.
Even support for the abstract ideal of "national unity" has been collapsing rapidly in Iraq, reflecting the collapse of three consecutive "national unity" governments. In 2004, only the Kurds (18 percent of respondents) wanted Iraq to be divided along ethnic lines - in 2007, 42 percent of Iraqis prefer this type of solution, while 57 percent believe it to be inevitable.
However, this is not necessarily a bad thing. Figures compiled by Iraq Body Count show a dramatic, temporary fall in the death toll in Baghdad between January and February of this year, from 1,584 civilians killed (an annual rate of over 19,000) to 446 (an annual rate of about 5,000).
This means that the president's strategy - increasing the number of U.S. troops in Baghdad - has temporarily reduced the level of violence in the city. The temporary - and partial - success of this "surge" has given Iraqis some breathing room to begin finding permanent solutions to their ethnic problems.
It is not surprising, given how quickly the idea of "national unity" is losing ground in Iraq, that a faction in the Iraqi Parliament, led by Ayatollah al-Hakim, is calling for a division of Iraq along federal lines, with oil wealth being shared.
The United States should fall behind this idea of division, which is gaining support among the Iraqi public and would mean a decisive change in our failed strategy in that country.
As the 2008 election draws closer, our time in Iraq is running out. What better way to bring peace to Baghdad than to divide the city along the Tigris River and allow Sunni and Shi'a families to migrate peacefully to the side where they feel safest? A river would act as a tangible, military barrier to separate the militias on the two sides even after American forces had left.
What better way to break the ethnic deadlock that has paralyzed the Iraqi government and parliament than to split these up along federal lines - with local governments and local parliaments for Iraq's three major ethnic regions? Is there anything - other than the deadlock in Baghdad - preventing the Shi'a South of Iraq from developing an effective and democratic government, just like the Kurds in the North? And who is more likely to defeat the insurgency in Sunni Anbar Province - a foreign occupier backing a Shi'a-dominated government, or Sunni generals with the backing of a Sunni government and parliament?
For those who would argue that Arab culture doesn't support democracy, I would offer in rebuttal the fact that a majority of Iraqis (53 percent) continue to support the idea of a democratic government even in this dark moment, while only a small minority (26 percent) would favor a return to "a government headed by one man for life." Even at this low point, only 36 percent of Iraqis say that their lives are worse than they were under Saddam - and even among that 36 percent, a third seem to dread the idea of returning to his style of rule. It seems that even Arabs prefer to govern themselves, rather than being forced to bow to the will of a brutal dictator - something that might come as a shock to so-called "cultural relativism" theorists.
We owe it to Iraqis to build their democracy within an institutional framework that acknowledges their deep ethnic divisions, instead of trying to paper them over. We owe Iraqis a choice that involves neither genocide nor perpetual occupation.
Michal Zapendowski '07 wishes he, too, were being offered a choice for 2008 that went beyond those options.
