The carnage in Iraq

Like any other thinking, feeling person I’m horrified and saddened by the carnage in Iraq:

BAGHDAD, Iraq – Two bombs killed 22 people in northern Iraq on Friday as the government tried to tamp down violence and head off civil war a day after Sunni-Arab insurgents killed 215 people in an attack on Baghdad’s Sadr City slum that intensified Shiite anger at the United States.

The blasts in Tal Afar, 260 miles northwest of Baghdad, involved explosives hidden in a parked car and in a suicide belt worn by a pedestrian that detonated simultaneously outside a car dealership at 11 a.m., said police Brig. Khalaf al-Jubouri. He said the casualties — 22 dead, 26 wounded — were expected to rise.

Rather than endlessly rehashing how things came to this point I think it’s more productive to ask what is to be done now?

Portraying what’s going on in Iraq now as solely an insurgency against an American occupation seems decreasingly credible:

The Sunni militants’ version of “insurgency” and “freedomfighting” is non-sensicial; they want not to fight the “occupier” but to kill the occupied. It is the most heinous and disgusting form of “resistance” I have ever seen in my life, or read about. Their strategy is: if we murder enough Iraqi elders, women and children, then the Americans will leave.

Or, perhaps, there is no unitary insurgency in Iraq but insurgencies: against the Americans, against the Iraqi government, against the Shi’a, against civil order itself. And, clearly, there’s also a cycle of revenge and retribution both for decades of repression and more recent grievances.

Given such an environment what will withdrawing American forces from Iraq accomplish? I would welcome evidence that the carnage in Iraq will end when the Americans leave which is apparently what Congressional Democrats believe (is there another interpretation of “phased re-deployment”?).

I think it’s significantly more likely that without any manhole cover provided by the presence of American forces the sewer that is Iraq today will overflow all boundaries and the killings there, and possibly elsewhere as well, will escalate. Perhaps at this point there’s nothing whatever that can be done to end the violence.

We can’t be certain of the outcome if we stay. But we can be certain that our ability to influence events in Iraq will decrease dramatically if we leave.

It’s certain as well that if we remove our troops from Iraq it will take those troops out of harm’s way there. Is that the only goal that can be accomplished?

Update

Although for a re-hash of how things got to where they are now you could do worse than Mark Danner’s lengthy examination in The New York Review of Books. If you haven’t seen it, I recommend you read the whole thing but his conclusion is especially worth noting:

We are well down the road toward this dark vision, a wave of threatening instability that stands as the precise opposite of the Bush administration’s “democratic tsunami,” the wave of liberalizing revolution that American power, through the invasion of Iraq, was to set loose throughout the Middle East. The chances of accomplishing such change within Iraq itself, let alone across the complicated landscape of the entire region, were always very small. Saddam Hussein and the autocracy he ruled were the product of a dysfunctional politics, not the cause of it. Reform of such a politics was always going to be a task of incalculable complexity. Faced with such complexity, and determined to have their war and their democratic revolution, the President and his counselors looked away. Confronted with great difficulties, their answer was to blind themselves to them and put their faith in ideology and hope—in the dream of a welcoming landscape, magically transformed. The evangelical vision may have made the sense of threat after September 11 easier to bear but it did not change the risks and the reality on the ground. The result is that the wave of change the President and his officials were so determined to set in course by unleashing American military power may well turn out to be precisely the wave of Islamic radicalism that they had hoped to prevent.

Another update

Back Talk has a succinct criticism of the notion that American withdrawal (or the threat of such) will move the Iraqi government to greater efforts:

What is in doubt is our staying power, not our leaving power.

5 comments… add one
  • Mate, there is no bloody difference and I would bloody well invite you to end your self goddamned deception and the intellectual whanking. There is not a “tamper” it is merely a diffusion – rather like Lebanon, the Americans are merely now one of the clans, and sadly among the least informed and skilled.

  • Our presence props up the Maliki “government.” The Maliki government has no noticeable authority over Iraq. They are nominally in charge of Iraqi forces. Forces which seem to embody the Maliki government’s own fecklessness and irrelevance.

    Is the Maliki government gaining authority? Is it likely to gain authority so long as they survive thanks solely to our army? Would they suddenly gain authority and legitimacy if the Iraqi army took over the propping-up role from our army? I think the answers there are “no,” “no” and “no” respectively.

    So what exactly are we accomplishing? We’re just kicking the can down the road. We’re stalling.

  • kreiz Link

    M Tak- you not blogging anymore but you’re still getting it right. Yeah, we’re stalling. And like all major powers in similar situations, we’re not keen on admitting it. Unfortunately, the rest of the ME is a shark smelling blood in the water.

  • jill manfreddi Link

    How much of the “carnage” in Iraq bogus?

    Two well researched blogs on Iraq reporting by the L.A. Times and the AP.

    “Is the L.A. Times reporting unconfirmed enemy propaganda from an Iraqi stringer with ties to the insurgency? Or is the paper simply misreporting the facts, and failing to seek out and report the military’s side of the story?”

    http://tinyurl.com/yfzf2l

    Centcom is waiting to hear back from the AP before issuing a press release about this. They’ve requested a retraction of the “burned alive” story or “a correction at a minimum.”

    http://floppingaces2.blogspot.com/

    So who are the sources for all theses stories out of Iraq. Is this what we must depend on in making an analysis of the war in Iraq?

    The AP has been using the same “source” for months. Now we know that this “source” and another appear to be completely bogus. I cannot put into words here what I think of the L.A. Times story. Truly, a sad situation

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