More Than Meets the Eye: The Bombings in Iraq
The bombings Tuesday looked more like an act of genocide, an attempt to erase as many Yazidis as possible from the face of the earth. The motive for this atrocity might not have been political but religious; it might have been the work of Muslim fundamentalists trying to settle a centuries-old local grievance, rather than the work of Muslim fundamentalists trying to drive the Americans out of Iraq or establish a new caliphate in the Middle East.
The point is that here in Washington, we talk about Iraq as if we were intimately familiar with all its fractures, fissures and fault lines. The Bush administration touts as a breakthrough the recent decision of provincial Sunni Muslim sheiks to cooperate with U.S. forces -- but it's also possible that the sheiks are just maneuvering to be in a better position when the Americans eventually leave. The administration says there might be genocide if America pulls out -- but it looks as if genocide has already been attempted.
Some war critics confidently predict that if the United States were to withdraw its troops, the al-Qaeda presence in Iraq would quickly become a non-factor -- that foreign-born terrorists, having outlived their usefulness to the Sunni community, would be driven out or otherwise neutralized.
I happen to think this is a reasonable hypothesis. But I'm anything but confident.
There are those who will see Tuesday's awful bombings as an illustration of why U.S. forces should stay in Iraq. I see the carnage as an illustration of how little the presence of 162,000 American troops can accomplish in a country the size of Iraq.
To say that the divisions in Iraq boil down to just Sunni, Shia and Kurds is like saying everyone in the US is either Catholic, Baptist or Protestant. We know that's not true, so why assume that every attack in Iraq is do to one of it's "Big Three" battling each other? As Robinson said, it could very well be that amongst the battle for control of Iraq, some factions are using the confusion to settling centuries-old rivalries.
Another way to think about it: Imagine that it's the late 1340's if you are part of a group or tribe who's in constant conflict with another one. They want nothing but your total annihilation, but they can't do it because the world's superpowers have intervened. All of a sudden, the Black Death hits and people start dying in the hundreds. With all the political, religious and socio-economic chaos going on, do you think that your foes would hesitate to use this to their advantage?
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