Belittling Ethnic Cleansing

By Cernig

Ezra Klein writes:

The blogless life was going okay for Matt Yglesias until he ran across the Pollack, O'Hanlon, and Biddle op-ed from Foreign Affairs and got on Gchat:

10:51
someone needs to note the illogic in this from O'Hanlon and Pollack:

"It is worth noting that separation resulting from sectarian cleansing was not the chief cause of the reduction in violence, as some have claimed. Much of Iraq remains intermingled but increasingly peaceful. And whereas a cleansing argument implies that casualties should have gone down in Baghdad, for example, as mixed neighborhoods were cleansed, casualties actually went up consistently during the sectarian warfare of 2006. Cleansing may have reduced the violence somewhat in some places, but it was not the main cause."

10:52
OF COURSE VIOLENCE WENT UP DURING THE CLEANSING
10:52
!!!!!!
10:52
the ethnic cleansing consists of violence!

Ezra goes on to note the smoke and mirrors deception perpertated by O'Hanlon et. al. in their op-ed when they write that "if an electoral crisis or some other event returns Iraq to civil war, it would be very hard to justify another troop surge to try to stabilize Iraq. Containment -- withdrawing all U.S. troops while working to prevent the chaos in Iraq from spilling over to the rest of the region -- would then become the United States' only realistic option."

In other words, a few years ago, when everything was going badly, we couldn't leave because Iraq would collapse into chaos. Now we can only leave if Iraq collapses into chaos, but have to hang around in order to cement its gains. There's sort of a heads-we-stay, tails-we-never-leave thing going on.

But Spencer Ackerman points to the cold-blooded nastiness of O'Hanlon, Pollock and Biddle:

Ethnic cleansing is a crime against humanity. The U.S. quite rightly intervened in the Balkans in the 1990s to stop it. The horrors of ethnic cleansing are unfathomable to those who haven't experienced them. What you really, really shouldn't do is treat other people's ethnic cleansing as a debaters' point. It's perverse, isn't it, the way that ethnic cleansing that occurred during a U.S. occupation can be treated so nonchalantly by Washington polemicists.

No, there's no additional analysis of this from me. None needed.

Comments

[zenpundit]

Hi C.

"It's perverse, isn't it, the way that ethnic cleansing that occurred during a U.S. occupation can be treated so nonchalantly by Washington polemicists"

This begs the question of whether the assumption here is that MNF-1 forces constrained ethnic cleansing, encouraged it or were irrelevant to the dynamic.

If the U.S. military had abruptly bugged out of Iraq instead of going the route of the Surge (or leaving earlier when the insurgency ramped up)would ethnic cleansing in Iraq have been greater or have been less ?

If it would have greater, should we have left Iraq regardless ?

[Steve Hynd]

Zen,

A quarter of the Iraqi population are either refugees or internally displaced. The map of Baghdad over the last three years has become increasingly sectarian, redefined to the point that now there are almost zero mixed areas left where they used to represent over a third. How much worse do you realistically think it could have been? How much worse would it have been if the US hadn't invaded? Or hadn't disbanded the original Army and beaurocracy? Or hadn't had such a mess for a CPA? Where would you like to begin your hypothetical timeline?

Regards, C

[zenpundit]

"How much worse do you realistically think it could have been?"

Human nature being what it is, maybe a mini-me Killing Fields on the Euphrates, worst case scenario of course.

[Steve Hynd]

Zen, I'd suggest that if you asked the Iraqi people, that's exactly what they've had already.

But you're perhaps missing my larger point. If we're going to talk about preventing or allowing hypothetical bloodbaths, then the obvious point to begin is before the invasion. However, the conservative emphasis on the Surge instead of the invasion and disasterous decisions in its aftermath has succeeded in redefining the frame so that, as McCain puts it, before the Surge began is just history while afterwards it's policy debate.

Regards, C