What About the Good News?

Haven't had a good Iraq post in a while:

After centuries full of vibrant interaction, of marrying, sharing and selling across sects and classes, Baghdad has become a capital of corrosive and violent borderlines. Streets never crossed. Conversations never started. Doors never entered.

Sunnis and Shiites in many professions now interact almost exclusively with colleagues of the same sect. Sunnis say they are afraid to visit hospitals because Shiites loyal to the cleric Moktada al-Sadr run the Health Ministry, while Shiite laborers who used to climb into the back of pickup trucks for work across the Tigris River in Sunni western Baghdad now take jobs only near home.

I'm told, though, that the sectarian-segregated crews have done a really good job of painting many schools. Many schools. Why do you hate America?

Comments

Unfortunately most of these schools were blown up or riddled with bullets after the painting, but they had a fresh coat nonetheless.

Posted by Thunderlips | March 4, 2007 12:13 PM

http://riverbendblog.blogspot.com/2007_02_01_riverbendblog_archive.html#117192450286818012

Posted by DB | March 4, 2007 3:55 PM

I want to know how many schools have been painted--not just that many have been painted. I don't know why the MSM doesn't ask Tony Snow every day at the presser, and why no one in the MSM has ever asked W that question. And BTW how much did it cost per school?

Posted by eCAHNomics | March 4, 2007 5:13 PM

War makes the world poor.

Posted by ferd | March 4, 2007 5:56 PM

The three studies I've seen estimate the percent of Iraqi marriages between first or second cousins to be 46%, 53%, and 59%. So, this was a society ready to be fractured, since the usual broad family ties found in outbreeding cultures were much less common in this inbreeding one.

Posted by Steve Sailer | March 4, 2007 6:19 PM

Sailer --
Why is it thatI can say with complete certainty, completely off the top of my head, without doing any research on anything to do with the matter, that the theory that inbreeding causes civil war is a big load of shit?

Posted by SqueakyRat | March 4, 2007 7:14 PM

So, you're saying conditions today in Bagdhad have existed for centuries? That's what the NY Times piece you've linked to implies, that we're trying to fix in three weeks what took centuries to develop.

This is a curious new meme, given the frequent citation that Iraq is "lines on a map drawn by Winston Churchill in 1921" and not a real country. True or not, it appears the biggest and most important city in the region has grown up over a lifespan longer than any American city's to despite the factionalism.

Just guessing here, but it also seems likely that Hussein's reign accentuated the factionalism, because in a Stalinist regime like that, you would tend to want to associate only with those closest to you, who you could trust completely.

It's not as if the mental landscape of cities other than Bagdhad aren't drawn by factions and their turf. The LA Times today has a report about a neighborhood in South LA where, above a certain street, anyone who is black can expect to be shot.

Posted by John S. | March 4, 2007 11:29 PM