Nir Rosen, [who by way of disclosure, works with my brother at the New America Foundation] has a horrifying description of life in Iraq. Here’s the lede:
Every morning the streets of Baghdad are littered with dozens of bodies, bruised, torn, mutilated, executed only because they are Sunni or because they are Shiite. Power drills are an especially popular torture device.
Rosen describes a country in the throes of a sectarian civil war, where it is no longer safe to engage in conversation unless you know whether your interlocutor is a Sunni or a Shi’a. It took a while for this to develop, and I have to wonder whether America didn’t help it along. The surface explanation for it places the weight of responsibility on bogeyman al-Zarqawi.
During the first battle of Fallujah, in the spring of 2004, Sunni insurgents fought alongside some Shiite forces against the Americans; by that fall, the Sunnis waged their resistance alone in Fallujah, and they resented the Shiites’ indifference.
But by that time, Shiite frustration with Sunnis for harboring Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the bloodthirsty head of al-Qaeda in Iraq, led some to feel that the Fallujans were getting what they deserved. The cycle of violence escalated from there. When Sunni refugees from Fallujah settled in west Baghdad’s Sunni strongholds such as Ghazaliya, al-Amriya and Khadhra, the first Shiiite families began to get threats to leave. In Amriya, Shiites who ignored the threats had their homes attacked or their men murdered by Sunni militias.
This is when sectarian cleansing truly began. Sunni refugees in Amriya seized homes vacated by Shiites.
Whether by accident or design, the Americans saw the enemy splinter between the two attacks on Falluja. The Shiites had come to see Falluja as a symbol of the car bombs and other attacks attributed to Zarqawi that were killing them in droves. They withheld their support when America attacked a second time. That was when the civil war really began, but it didn’t become catastrophic until this year.
In November I asked a close Shiite friend if — considering all this violence, crime and radicalism in Iraq — life had not been better under Hussein.
“No,” he said definitively. “They could level all of Baghdad and it would still be better than Saddam. At least we have hope.”
A few weeks later, though, he e-mailed me in despair: “A civil war will happen I’m sure of it . . . you can’t be comfortable talking with a man until you know if he was Shia or Sunni, . . . Politicians don’t trust each other, People don’t trust each other. [There is] seeking revenge, weak government, separate regions for the opponents . . . We have a civil war here; it is only a matter of time, and some peppers to provoke it.”
The time came on Feb. 22, when the Golden Mosque of the Shiites in Samarra was blown up. More than 1,000 Sunnis were killed in retribution, and then the Shiite-controlled interior ministry prevented an accurate body count from being released. Attacks on mosques, mostly Sunni ones, increased. Officially, Moqtada al-Sadr opposed attacks on Sunnis, but he unleashed his fighters on them after the bombing.
The bombing of the Samarra mosque has also been attributed to al-Zarqawi. But it’s effect has been at least a mixed blessing to American troops.
Sunni militias that had fought the American occupier became Sunni militias protecting Sunni territory from Shiite incursions and retaliating in Shiite areas. The insurgency became secondary as resistance moved to self-defense.
So, here is my question. Have our military commanders encouraged sectarian violence for the precise purpose of getting the Sunni militias to make the insurgency secondary to self-defense against the Shi’a?
Could we have blundered into helping to create a civil war in order to take the heat off our troops? And, even if that is not the case, and this happened in spite of our best efforts to bring peace, calm, and security to Iraq, what does that tell us about our ability to control events and make a positive difference?
It’s Memorial Day. It’s a day to remember the sacrifices of our soldiers. They have sacrificed a lot in Iraq, but they have not succeeded in their mission. It’s time to bring them home.
