Cleansing Baghdad

Andrew linked yesterday to Zeyad Kasim's map of ethnic cleansing in Baghdad -- the city has become substantially segregated by now, as every occasional massacre prompts a larger number of people to move before they become the next victims.

That's the state of play right now with 160,000 American troops in the country and with a policy decision made to station a larger proportion of US forces specifically in Baghdad than had been the case earlier. So, yes, it's true that terrible things will happen if we have the military leave Iraq, but terrible things are happening right now and our military can't stop them.

Comments

Arguably, ethnic cleansing is a good thing in this situation because it may reduce the sectarian violence. One of the intriguing arguments in favor of US withdrawal is that may speed up the civil conflict and thus bring it to an end more quickly.

Unfortunately, there are a lot of people in the U.S. who are happy to see muslims killing other muslims, and have no desire for this situation to change.

Posted by Jim W | July 26, 2007 10:22 AM

The situation (and the map) also, in a way, give lie to the idea that "Sunni and Shia have been fighting for centuries." If that were absolutely true, how did Baghdad come to be as mixed as it is? Clearly there was some measure of peaceful integration -- refugees and emigrants speak in interviews about how tacky it used to be talk about one's sectarian background, and mixed marriages were common enough.

Maybe that attitude disappeared with the flight of Iraqi refugees, who (totally uninformed guess) are more predominantly middle class, urban, educated, etc.

Sectarian peace isn't something that has to be created out of whole cloth; I think it's something that already did exist, to some extent, and has been totally lost.

Posted by geoff | July 26, 2007 11:37 AM

Well, yea but that's not the argument being made. The surge advocates are arguing that things will be much worse for the Iraqis if we leave, not that things are going well now and bad things will happen if we leave. Whether it is or not,is an open question.

I think there's a good chance that it could be but I also think its a possibility that it wouldn't. What I do know is that whether things would be worse if we left is irrelevant because we do not have the ability to resolve this situation.

I know you are making a similar argument but it behooves you to actually engage with the other sides argument instead of addressing an argument that no surge advocate is making.

Posted by Joseph | July 26, 2007 11:45 AM

I'm not sure that in the scheme of things, people moving to different neighborhoods and segregating themselves by tribe/religion in Baghdad counts as "terrible things."

Posted by Tyro | July 26, 2007 11:48 AM

If I were Zeyad Kasim and there's an area on the map called "GREEN ZONE", I would have chosen some other color for Shi'ite districts than... green.

Just sayin'.

Posted by DNS | July 27, 2007 11:48 AM