Disaster by another name still a disaster

By BILL FERGUSON
MCCLATCHY NEWSPAPERS
This week it was reported that the situation in Iraq has deteriorated into a state of civil war. Or else it hasn't. It depends on where you get your news.
Until recently "sectarian violence" was the widely accepted term used by news organizations to refer to the bloody conflict between the Shiite and Sunni factions in Iraq. But because of the recent surge in fatalities (more than 200 people died in one particularly hellish day in November) some organizations have started characterizing the situation as being "on the brink of" civil war or just flat-out saying that a civil war has already broken out.
Unsurprisingly, news outlets that have historically been less-than-friendly to the Bush administration have been the first to jump on the "civil war" bandwagon, while the outlets that have stuck by him through the tough times continue to use less emotionally charged terminology to refer to the sectarian strife.
It's not hard to see the political underpinnings of this rhetorical ambivalence. An open admission that an all-out civil war has broken out in Iraq would represent a new plateau of futility for our mission there and would only increase the volume of the voices that are demanding that we get out now.
President Bush assures us, of course, that Iraq has definitely not descended into civil war and that the real culprit behind the Sunni-Shiite violence is (you guessed it) a nefarious plot by al-Qaida. So anyone who refers to the internal strife in Iraq as a civil war is playing right into the hands of the terrorists. Funny how anyone who questions the policies or actions of the Bush regime always ends up being an unwitting dupe of those evil terrorists, isn't it?
It's the same old song, and it's one most of us are tired of hearing. Call it what you will, no one (not even Bush himself) is claiming that we have made anything approaching acceptable progress in Iraq, and fewer and fewer Americans believe we are on a credible path to achieving the president's goals of stability and democracy there.
Not a clue
I wish I knew what we need to do to bring our troops home from Iraq without incurring an even more damaging foreign policy disaster, but I feel about as clueless as Bush appears to be in this matter. Should we pull out all our troops right away, commit to a phased drawdown, or send in even more troops? What's the smart thing to do? Does anyone have a clue at this point?
At times like these I tend to turn to people who I believe have demonstrated insight and clear thinking in the past, so let me turn to one of my favorite guys in the world, Dilbert creator Scott Adams, for a little wisdom on the subject of Iraq.
In a recent entry in his Dilbert blog (which you can access from the official Dilbert Web site) Scott points out that there are many unknowns in a situation like Iraq and that we really can't determine with any certainty whether our continued occupation of that country is making things better or worse, either for Iraq or for America.
The one and only thing we can be sure of, Scott points out, is that if we don't pull our troops out more Americans will be killed and wounded. So based on the one factor we truly understand, withdrawal is the most rational path for us to take.
Scott's thinking has the ring of common sense to it. If we have a workable plan for leaving Iraq a significantly more stable and livable place if we continue our occupation, we need to hear it now. Otherwise we're just sacrificing American lives to satisfy the hubris of our political leaders.
Bill Ferguson is a columnist for the Macon (Ga.) Telegraph. Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services..