Make a desert and call it peace

By Fester:

The AP Reports:

Attacks on Iraqi security forces have increased in an area south of Baghdad where the Iraqis are in control, even as violence nationwide has fallen to levels of the first months of the war, U.S. officers said Wednesday.

The AP also reports:

Only an estimated 16 percent of the mainly Sunni families forced by Shiite militiamen and death squads to flee their homes have dared to return.

It takes two sides to have a fight, and there's really only one side left in Baghdad...

Baghdad has been much calmer since the massacres reached their peak in late 2006 and the first half of 2007. But the calm has been achieved in part because the city is now ethnically divided. Shiites predominate. Sunnis have largely fled.

The situation is somewhat similar to Bosnia after the war of the 1990s — years of calm but no lasting political reconciliation after its populations divided into different regions and governments.

Violence is down because there was mass ethnic cleansing in conjunction with the formation of militias that have minimal loyalties to a central state (which is the center of gravity for US COIN doctrine), and this is being proclaimed a successful COIN operation?