Michelle Malkin in Baghdad

A few weeks ago conservative columnist and blogger Michelle Malkin took out after the AP for relying on unreliable sources in Iraq.  The upshot was a visit to Baghdad.  Just back from the front, Malkin writes:

I came to Iraq a darkening pessimist about the war, due in large part to my doubts about the compatability of Islam and Western-style democracy, but also as a result of the steady, sensational diet of “grim milestone” and “daily IED count” media coverage that aids the insurgency.

I left Iraq with unexpected hope and resolve.

The question is whether US resolve to “bring security to Iraq, one neighborhood at a time” can bring peace to Iraq short of a real civil war in which the future of the nation is proved by a trial of strength.  Read the peripatetic Spengler as he recommends civil war to the Prime Minister of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas.

[C]ivil war is the sine qua non of nationhood. Permit me to try to sell you on the merits of having a civil war of your very own. Think of a civil war not as a luxury, but as an investment.

Real nations, as opposed to romantic visions of nations, have no room for irredentists and other rejectionists... Having a civil war is de rigeur. All the right people do it. It shows that the prospective nation has the grit to sort out its own problems.

The problem is that a civil war is much better when you can do it yourself with a minimum of interference from outside.  Outside interference (think Thirty Years War, Spanish Civil War) just makes the civil war longer and bloodier.

That’s what is really scary about the Iraq situation.  Everybody is muscling in—the US, the Saudis, the Iranians, the Syrians—when really the Iraqis should be getting on with it themselves.

But thanks to the courageous Michelle Malkin for going to Iraq and learning about that nation with boots on the ground.