‘Ethnically cleansed neighborhoods’ lead to less violence
Over the weekend, the WaPo ran a report on a U.S. battalion’s perspective on the war in Iraq, and quoted Maj. Eric Timmerman describing the conditions this way: “It’s just a slow, somewhat government-supported sectarian cleansing.”
For reasons that I haven’t been able to fully grasp, it’s one of the aspects of recent events in Iraq that seems to be left out of the broader debate. It’s certainly encouraging when we see evidence of a decline in sectarian violence, but when war supporters boast about the results, they seem to miss the point. The results aren’t evidence of a successful “surge,” they’re evidence of a successful cleansing campaign.
The Government Accountability Office’s Joe Christoff touched on this yesterday before the House Appropriations Committee.
“I think that’s [ethnic cleansing] an important consideration in even assessing the overall security situation in Iraq. You know, we look at the attack data going down, but it’s not taking into consideration that there might be fewer attacks because you have ethnically cleansed neighborhoods, particularly in the Baghdad area.”
As TP noted, ret. Gen. James Jones said the same thing last month, noting unfortunate “progress” in a Shi’a-led ethnic cleansing campaign.
Except this isn’t the “progress” we’ve been waiting for. It’s the opposite. Supporters of the president’s policy have argued for years that a U.S. withdrawal would lead to the forced displacement of Iraqi civilians. But what war supporters argued would happen has already happened, it just developed slower.
As McClatchy recently reported, military officers believe drops in sectarian attacks “may be an indication that ethnic cleansing has been completed in many neighborhoods and that there aren’t as many people to kill.”
Matt Yglesias highlighted this point well the other day.
This is the basically fraudulent nature of the American enterprise in Iraq. We’re told we can’t leave because of the civil war that would break out or intensify or whatever if we do. But our troops aren’t really capable of meaningfully impacting the result of the sectarian conflict anyway. Instead, they’re just being plopped into the middle of it and exposed to harm, so that when the conflict eventually ends (as conflicts tend to) we can call the results “victory” and stay in Iraq forever. If the violence waxes, that shows the war needs to continue. If it wanes, that shows that we’re winning and need to keep on keeping on. Meanwhile, in the real world the civil war and ethnic cleansing we’re supposed to be preventing are things that have already happened.
Newsweek added recently that the Maliki government, which Sunnis do not trust, has asked Sunni residents to return to their old neighborhoods in exchange for a reward worth about $800 US. It’s not working — said a U.S. official familiar with refugee issues, “Sunnis are reluctant to go back to areas when it’s only Iraqi security forces there managing their safety. In a lot of cases security forces participated in their displacement.”
With or without us, the Iraqi civil war will end eventually — with a predictable outcome.
So maybe that was their plan all along? Did they leave the ammo dumps unguarded for months because they wanted the locals to bring on the civil war, and thus partition Iraq into the pieces that Churchill cobbled together so long ago and only people like Saddam could keep together?
Now that the ethnic cleansing has begun and “it’s not our fault” (as if), they could simply take it to the next level and partition the place, thereby putting the final nail in the coffin of the state known as Iraq.
Maybe the neocons aren’t as stupid as I thought. Evil, yes. But stupid… maybe not. They deliberately left the ammo dumps unguarded, for a very long time. This may be why they did that.
With a dominant Shia Iraq and a Shia Iran, good luck with that secular democracy promotion.
It just stands to reason that if the Shi’ites are fighting the Sunnis, and manage to push the Sunnis out of the area, the fighting is going to be markedly reduced; I don’t understand why more people don’t make that connection.
What is worrisome to me is that while there is progress in restoring more normalcy to these now-cleansed neighborhoods, it has to feel to the Sunnis that it is the US military that helped make that happen, and is now helping to keep it in place.
My local paper reported today that while thousands have volunteered, Sunnis have not been allowed into either the Army or the police by the Shi’ite government, and that some 6,000 have been waiting for months in northern Iraq.
Think about what that means – that a whole ethnic group is not being allowed to participate in the legislative process or in the security and defense of their country. And we’re helping!
This is not only going to make leaving a really tricky thing, but it is loading the region with people who are doing the slow burn of outrage at being disenfranchised. Makes them great tools for future terrorist events, I think.
But, what do I know – I’m just an increasingly irrelvant American voter wasting my time and energy actually thinking about the situation, when what I should really be doing is shopping away the terror…
There’s an interesting header article in today’s Salon that is worth reading when considering this issue. I think I have to agree with the author that if one doesn’t admit the behavior exists, it is impossible to change anything.
Given that about 99% of the Muslim world is Suuni, and that only IRan and Iraq are dominant Shia, I’d be curious as to how that other 99% are reacting to Bushylvania’s “Shia good—Sunni bad” policy.
Oh…my bad…it’s that “1% solution” thing again, isn’t it?
The Bush Doctrine: Achieving peace through running out of people to kill. Or perhaps more accurately, allowing a relative peace to be achieved through malignant neglect while trying to get the oil.
The other day, Giuliani stated that history would judge that going into Iraq was “the right thing to do.” He neglected to add, “for Iran.”
The irony is that Bush’s ineptitude is enabling the creation of another Shi’a theocracy whose policies regarding oil and a lot of other things will reflect that of their co-religionists in Iran. We may, in the end, get Iraqi oil but, the price will be paid in Euros and humiliation.