All this stuff about to come out from the Baker Commission/Iraq Study Group on future US policy in Iraq has the whiff of irrelevancy. NY Times columnist David Brooks has been trotting out this stat over the last couple of weeks on the talk shows like PBS NewsHour - though not, far as I can tell, in his columns:
events in Iraq are happening faster than events in Washington. And what we’re seeing is the disintegration of Iraqi society.
I think about 10,000 Iraqis move every week back to their tribal homelands — Shia to Shia areas, Sunni to Sunni areas. And so you’ve had almost half a million people move. And so what’s happening is society as an organism is pulling back into itself. And I suspect that American policy and world policy hasn’t really caught up with that yet.
Where’s the 10,000 figure from? A collection of reports from NGOs, the US, UN, Iraqi ministries. Some notes here.
Hardly surprising. You’re in Iraq. No one is in charge. It’s not getting better, at least fast enough. You’re a Sunni in a majority Shi’ia part of Baghdad. Your cousin lives up the road in a village that’s majority Sunni. Your brother gets murdered in a sectarian killing. You pack up the family and move to where your cousin is. Repeat 10,000 times a week. Partition of Iraq is already happening, basically. It begins with this realisation:
No one is going to save you.
So Washington is a sideshow. Even the Stephen Hadley memo seems to make that clear.
The US hasn’t been able to make things on the ground in Iraq go its way since late 2003. There was a lag time before that became clear - crucially, until after the 2004 elections. Though Abu Ghraib and the failure to fire Rumsfeld over it should have been a clue.
About a year later it was starting to become clear, and you saw public opinion shift in the US decisively. Not “against the war” per se - though that may come - but a basic understanding that Washington doesn’t have a clue what to do in Iraq, that it’s not working, and that no one can say what ‘victory’ looks like. From that point on it becomes hard to justify American combat deaths - ‘combat’ in this case being blown up in your APC as it hits a roadside bomb.
Inevitably, Brooks and anyone else who supported the war and now is trying to get a read on where it’s likely to go from here, what the least worst option is, is going to get stick. Or have the crap beat out of them, like from this guy. They probably deserve it. And , yeah, ‘they’ includes me.
The question is, why is this - is it ethnic cleansing? - phenomenon not getting much play in Western media? Or what it means for the efficacy of any outside force to do much about it? If the US Army isn’t able or willing to suffer enough pain to establish security Iraq, who’s going to do it? The French?
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3 responses so far ↓
1 JC Skinner // Dec 12, 2006 at 4:41 pm
If it’s voluntary (in the sense that anything is voluntary under current circumstances) then it might not be ethnic cleansing?
Come now, Richard. Of course it is, and it’s happening with the complete approval of the occupying forces. Sure they did exactly the same in Afghanistan.
I sometimes wonder whether the secret aim is to destabilise regions beyond recognition, creating a lucrative eternal conflict zone to come, to which they can sell weapons, like with Iran and Iraq in the 80s.
2 JG // Dec 16, 2006 at 12:57 pm
No, not the Frech because they didn’t cause the catastrophe.
3 R. Delevan // Dec 20, 2006 at 7:54 am
I’m not arguing it’s not ethnic cleansing - nor, in any sense defending or excusing it (which seems to be how you’ve read it). I’m saying it’s happening, and that it’s happening without regard for what the US or anyone else does or doesn’t do. It demonstrates the futility of anything Washington decides.
As far as a “secret aim”, you flatter them by thinking there’s a plan at all.
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