Soft Bigotry of Low Expectations of al Maliki Posted by Suzanne Nossel

In the aftermath of the most deadly bomging since the US-led occupation of Iraq began, President Bush praises the Iraqi government for professing to care to keep its citizens alive (not, mind you, for doing anything to further that end).  He said:

"I appreciate the fact that the Iraqi government is anxious to get security inside the capital of the country . . That is a good sign. It is a good sign that there is a sense of concern and anxiety. It means that the government understands they have a responsibility to protect their people."

It is a "good sign" that Iraqi officials are distressed by mass carnage in broad daylight in the country's capital?  Talk about the soft bigotry of low expectations. 

Comments

[Cal]

To be fair, the Iraqi gov't still shows more concern for Shiite lives than we do. Why are we asking the militias to disband before we can fill the security void? We essentially told the Shiites to unilaterally disarm, and the Sunni extremists took advantage.

"In Baghdad, for example, nearly three-quarters of residents polled said they would feel safer if U.S. and other foreign forces left Iraq..."

Is it any wonder?

[Don Bacon]

Cal, you lost me. The Shi'ite militias are going after Sunnis and occupying their mosques. How would stopping this (which the US can't do) be a "security void"? And are you really saying that Sunni "extremists" took advantage of something the US told the Shi'ites by bombing them? Did US government words really give them an advantage?

The word government when applied to Iraq might better be put in quotes, as Iraqi "government". The president and his cabinet are confined to the Green Zone and the legislature of 275 Iraqis has trouble getting 75 to show up for a session. The rest seem to prefer living in Amman and London, along with some cabinet members I suspect. So they have no power to do much of anything, and certainly are incapable of implementing anything like McCain's eighteen benchmarks included in his resolution. But Maliki is displaying concern and anxiety--that's a real plus. (If only Bush would, for Americans.)

I doubt that the US government has concern for any Iraqi lives, Shi'ite, Sunni or Kurd. Not for Shi'ites because they are latent Iranians, not for the Sunnis because the are Ba'athist reactionaries, and not for the Kurds because they are problems for our ally Turkey. And very few of them are Christians, are they? The US is not in Iraq due to any concern for any Iraqis but only for the oil, our oil which the Iraqis happen to be living over--the Iraqis still alive who have not emigrated. Soft bigotry. Or just bigotry. We're better than them, right? Because we're Americans, by God.

What a mess. "Concern and anxiety" ought to be good for another five hundred billion or so, with a few thousand lives thrown in. To tell you the truth, I'm beginning to doubt that Jesus in really George Bush's favorite political philosopher. Just a little. Adolph Hitler, maybe. Iraq as Poland. Except Hitler was a vegetarian, they say.

[Cal]

Hi Don. Take a look at this NY Times article:

In advance of the plan, which would flood Baghdad with thousands of new American and Iraqi troops, many Mahdi Army checkpoints were dismantled and its leaders were either in hiding or under arrest, which was one of the plan’s intended goals to reduce sectarian fighting. But with no immediate influx of new security forces to fill the void, Shiites say, Sunni militants and other anti-Shiite forces have been emboldened to plot the type of attack that obliterated the bustling Sadriya market...

This has happened again and again (scroll down to the "Fallacy #2" headline). We force the militias to remove their checkpoints, and then we're unable to step in and stop the car bombs. This is a major reason why Baghdad residents would feel safer if we left.

[Don Bacon]

Cal: Again, if by "security" you mean allowing Shiites to continue their genocide against Sunnis, you're right. Why would "checkpoints" be forcibly dismantled if they really contributed to security?

Also you ring my chimes when you quote the NY Times--a leading proponent of war with Iraq (then) and Iran (now).

Links often don't work on DA and we can't preview them. The only recourse is to check them after posting and then post the URL if necessary.

[J Thomas]

Don, remember that our information from iraq is strongly biased in various directions, to the point that it's very hard to tell what's going on at all.

"...allowing Shiites to continue their genocide against Sunnis...."

It's real real unclear. I wouldn't call it genocide yet, by official counts the death toll is still under 5000 a week, and that includes deaths on both sides. Not genocide levels yet. On the other hand, the official government *may* (I haven't seen that they explicitly announced this but they've announced some abstract things that sound like it) have cut off food rations to sunni areas on the grounds that the disorder prevents them from delivery. 3 years ago 80% of the country depended on those rations for their survival, and now the official government may be trying to starve them into submission. Yes, that would be genocide.

People talked for a long time like it was mostly sunni insurgents killing shias (at first because shia iraqi troops and police and government workers were easier targets than heavily-armed heavily-armored US troops with air support etc). And it was supposed to be disproportionately al Qaeda that killed civilians. This may have all been lies, fog of war and all that. I don't know and you don't know either.

And the story was that shias mostly didn't retaliate, until after the Golden Dome was destroyed. Al Qaeda didn't claim responsibility for that, nobody did, but a purported al Qaeda agent did admit to it under torture. Some particularly stupid americans have accepted that as proof that al Qaeda did it.

So then we started getting ethnic cleansing on both sides. However, as early as fall 2003 we were getting reports about academics and medical people being threatened -- leave the country or die. They'd get kidnapped and ransomed and told the next time they'd die. It didn't make sense at the time. These were mostly ethnicly sunnis though nonreligious, mostly apolitical etc. But it could have been ethnic cleansing by shias all along. Back in those days we assumed any violence was by the insurgency unless it was obviously gangsters.

So what would it take for the ethnic cleansing to die down? I dunno. I don't know what's going on and neither do you. Neither do our soldiers on the spot, they mostly hear what "friendly" iraqis tell them through translators. GIGO.

"Why would "checkpoints" be forcibly dismantled if they really contributed to security?"

First off, you're starting from the basic assumption that it's supposed to make sense. Our actions in iraq haven't made sense so far, why would we start now?

But to make sense of it using the biased filtered data that's available -- iraqi militia checkpoints provide security *for their own neighborhoods*. If somebody tries to bring in a truck bomb and they stop them, that's a big plus for them. Checkpoints can also screen the traveling public and kidnap people that they don't like. This is a big minus for the people they don't like. Obviously, the official government wants to be the only one with power, so they would want to dismantle the militias. But the official government isn't ready to provide security, having very few loyal troops and no loyal police etc. The obvious solution would be to deputise the various militias until the emergency is over, and give them clear areas of authority. Get caught with weapons outside your area and your deputy ID doesn't help you. But the americans won't let them do that.

The iraqi government says they can take care of the ethnic disturbances and the insurgency if the USA will just let them run things. And they claim the USA has agreed to that now, but it isn't clear how true that actually is. Certainly we won't put US troops under iraqi orders, or have iraqis anywhere in our chain of command. So we have a doubled COC, where in theory each iraqi is paired with a US officer and they're officially supposed to agree on everything.

Can we provide the level of security that the various militias provide to their own constituents? It seems unlikely. Our idea has usually been that once we kill or drive out the bad guys, then there won't be any need for security from them.

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