WASHINGTON - The Bush administration’s top two officials in Iraq answered questions from Congress for more than six hours on Monday, but their testimony may have been as important for what they didn’t say as for what they did.
A chart displayed by Army Gen. David Petraeus that purported to show the decline in sectarian violence in Baghdad between December and August made no effort to show that the ethnic character of many of the neighborhoods had changed in that same period from majority Sunni Muslim or mixed to majority Shiite Muslim.
Neither Petraeus nor U.S. Ambassador Ryan Crocker talked about the fact that since the troop surge began the pace by which Iraqis were abandoning their homes in search of safety had increased. They didn’t mention that 86 percent of Iraqis who’ve fled their homes said they’d been targeted because of their sect, according to the International Organization for Migration.
Read the article here.
The piece goes on to make three basic points:
- There has been no real drop in civilian casualties among the Iraqis. The evidence presented is statistical sleight of hand.
- A "fall in violence" has taken place in some neighborhoods, but it is not the result of American troops suppressing sectarian violence. Quite the contrary, it is the result of the fact that violent ethnic cleansing has been completed. That is, previously mixed neighborhoods have been purified [usually with the aid of American troops, who drive away the armed militias (always labeled as "terrorists") that defend embattled Sunni residents].
- As a result of this sustained ethnic cleansing, which is continuing apace in the still mixed neighborhoods, the number of refugees inside and outside Iraq continues to mount dramatically, creating the kind of terminal misery that only losing your home and livelihood in a disaster area can produce.
I guess that's the definition of "progress" and of "winning in Iraq" that we're looking for.
No comments:
Post a Comment