The End of Iraq

Even on the surface, Iraq has really spun out of control and into civil war this week. The Prime Minister is calling his reconciliation plan "one last chance" for peace. The US Ambassador is finally acknowledging that the biggest threat in the country is not al Qaeda but sectarian violence. The US commander George Casey is calling for additional troops to be moved into Baghdad. In fact, we've already added 15,000 additional troops in the city, and it hasn't done a thing. Even the Defense Secretary dropped into Baghdad to huddle with officials over the situation. Now, of course, his rose-colored glasses haven't come off:

An upbeat Rumsfeld said he was confident Iraq would emerge from the violence as a "fine success" for the region.

Look, not EVERYONE'S going to change their views based on events on the ground. You'd have to have a conscience to do that.

But what's even more terrifying are the stories we're not hearing in the US media. If you only watched CNN or Fox News you'd think Iraq was in pretty bad shape. If you read Iraqi blogger Riverbend's recent entry, you'd think Iraq was a steaming pile of nightmares without hope or end:

The day before yesterday was catastrophic. The day began with news of the killings in Jihad Quarter. According to people who live there, black-clad militiamen drove in mid-morning and opened fire on people in the streets and even in houses. They began pulling people off the street and checking their ID cards to see if they had Sunni names or Shia names and then the Sunnis were driven away and killed. Some were executed right there in the area. The media is playing it down and claiming 37 dead but the people in the area say the number is nearer 60.

The horrific thing about the killings is that the area had been cut off for nearly two weeks by Ministry of Interior security forces and Americans. Last week, a car bomb was set off in front of a 'Sunni' mosque people in the area visit. The night before the massacre, a car bomb exploded in front of a Shia husseiniya in the same area. The next day was full of screaming and shooting and death for the people in the area. No one is quite sure why the Americans and the Ministry of Interior didn't respond immediately. They just sat by, on the outskirts of the area, and let the massacre happen.

This is the point. There's absolutely nothing that US forces could possibly do in a civil war. The options are this. Either we help out one side over the other, basically facilitating genocide; we try to segregate the two sides from each other, in which case we become an overt occupier and the target; or we sit by, helpless, watching Shia and Sunni killing each other. Like this person:

At nearly 2 pm, we received some terrible news. We lost a good friend in the killings. T. was a 26-year-old civil engineer who worked with a group of friends in a consultancy bureau in Jadriya. The last time I saw him was a week ago. He had stopped by the house to tell us his sister was engaged and he'd brought along with him pictures of latest project he was working on- a half-collapsed school building outside of Baghdad.

He usually left the house at 7 am to avoid the morning traffic jams and the heat. Yesterday, he decided to stay at home because he'd promised his mother he would bring Abu Kamal by the house to fix the generator which had suddenly died on them the night before. His parents say that T. was making his way out of the area on foot when the attack occurred and he got two bullets to the head. His brother could only identify him by the blood-stained t-shirt he was wearing.

It's important to read the personal stories of loss to really understand the catastrophe we have wrought over there. This is a lost city in a failed state, and anybody that can get out is doing it.

The news the world hears about Iraq and the situation in the country itself are wholly different. People are being driven out of their homes and areas by force and killed in the streets, and the Americans, Iranians and the Puppets talk of national conferences and progress [...]

Buses, planes and taxis leaving the country for Syria and Jordan are booked solid until the end of the summer. People are picking up and leaving en masse and most of them are planning to remain outside of the country. Life here has become unbearable because it's no longer a 'life' like people live abroad. It's simply a matter of survival, making it from one day to the next in one piece and coping with the loss of loved ones and friends- friends like T.

This was corroborated by an absolutely horrific report in the Times of London. We're about to have a severe refugee crisis on out hands in one of the poorer areas of the world. The Times story demands to be read in full; there are stories of midnight gun battles in Baghdad, Shia death squads, bodies piling up in the morgues. But I want to excerpt the portions about those who are fleeing. It's a long excerpt and I hope it's OK:

Hundreds — Sunni and Shia — are abandoning their homes. My driver said all his neighbours had now fled, their abandoned houses bullet-pocked and locked up. On a nearby mosque, competing Sunni and Shiite graffiti had been scrawled on the walls.

A senior nurse at Yarmouk hospital on the fringes of west Baghdad’s war zone said that he was close to being overwhelmed. “On Tuesday we received 35 bodies in one day, 16 from Al-Furat district alone. All of them were killed execution-style,” he said. “I thought it was the end of the city. I packed my bags at once and got ready to leave because they could storm the hospital at any moment.” [...]

A local journalist told me bitterly this week that Iraqis find it ironic that Saddam Hussein is on trial for killing 148 people 24 years ago, while militias loyal to political parties now in government kill that many people every few days. But it is not an irony that anyone here has time to laugh about. They are too busy packing their bags and wondering how they can get out alive.

Those that can are leaving the country. At Baghdad airport, throngs of Iraqis jostle for places on the flights out — testimony to the breakdown in Iraqi society.

One woman said that she and her three children were fleeing Mansour, once the most stylish part of the capital. “Every day there is fighting and killing,” she said as she boarded a plane for Damascus in Syria to sit out the horrors of Baghdad.

A neurologist, who was heading to Jordan with his wife, said that he would seek work abroad and hoped that he would never have to return. “We were so happy on April 9, 2003 when the Americans came. But I’ve given up. Iraq isn’t ready for democracy,” he said, sitting in a chair with a view of the airport runway.

Fares al-Mufti, an official with the Iraqi Airways booking office, told The Times that the national carrier had had to lay on an extra flight a day, all fully booked. Flights to Damascus have gone up from three a week to eight to cope with the panicked exodus.

Muhammad al-Ani, who runs fleets of Suburban cars to Jordan, said that the service to Amman was so oversubscribed that that prices had rocketed from $200 (£108) to $750 per trip in the past two weeks.

Despite the huge risks of driving through the Sunni Triangle, the number of buses to Jordan has mushroomed from 2 a day to as many as 40 or 50.

Abu Ahmed, a Sunni who was leaving Ghazaliya with his family and belongings, said that he was ready to pay the exorbitant prices being charged because his wife had received a death threat at the hospital in a Shia area where she worked.

“We can’t cope, we have to take the children out for a while,” he said.

In one of the few comprehensive surveys of how many Iraqis have fled their country since the US invasion, the US Committee for Refugees and Immigrants said last month that there were 644,500 refugees in Syria and Jordan in 2005 — about 2.5 per cent of Iraq’s population. In total, 889,000 Iraqis had moved abroad, creating “the biggest new flow of refugees in the world”, according to Lavinia Limon, the committee’s president.

And the exodus may only just be starting.

A mass exodus like ths doesn't happen because of a low-grade civil war, or a nascent civil war, or a country on the brink of a civil war. It happens during a civil war. No qualifications. That's where we're at in Iraq, and no solutions for the country can safely ignore this fact.

I'll tell you why the Republicans are so upset at a DCCC Web video which shows flag-draped coffins coming home from the region. It's because they understand that Americans see Iraq as an unspeakable tragedy. People aren't stupid. To the extent that Iraq is the issue in the midterms, it won't be a contest. The Republicans first tried to bully their way through, demagoguing the issue by intimating their opponents are in league with terrorists. Now, as DarkSyde notes, they're starting to wonder about that strategy, which foregrounds Iraq as the biggest issue in the elections. It would be fine if the Democrats just rolled over and played dead, but as the video shows, they're clearly not. For once, the Dems are calling the bluff.

It's of course crass to discuss the political ramifications of the nightmare in Iraq. But since that's the only way to minimize the horror for our soldiers and their families, it must be said. Minimizing the death and destruction for the Iraqis? It may now be too late.