More News You Won’t Read
Writing in the Sunday Times of London (07/30/06), Hamoudi Saffar reports from Baghdad:
US soldiers in tanks and armoured vehicles have moved back into many parts of the capital handed over to the Iraqi police last March after the opening of the country’s new parliament. Yesterday proved to be one of the most peaceful days in months, with no deaths reported in to capital by late afternoon… In contrast, an average of 100 people have been dying in sectarian attacks every day in Baghdad.
High civilian casualties, low troop casualties — The figures for July highlight the current character of the so-called “insurgency” in Iraq. The war took the lives of 45 American troops, or 1.5 per day. This is about 1/20th the loss rate of Vietnam, and slightly under the civilian homicide rate in either New York City or Los Angeles. For American troops, July ’06 was the 4th lightest casualty month in past three calendar years.
By the standards of war, what is occurring in Iraq barely merits the name.
In start contrast, there were over 1,060 July civilian deaths in Iraq, most of them in Baghdad and its immediate environs. That’s 25 times the military casualty rate.
This was not, as we are constantly told, the apex of civilian casualties in post-Saddam Iraq. That occurred in August of 2005, when 1524 died during anti-insurgent operations in Fallujah. And the mayhem was not pervasive. Fourteen of Iraq’s 18 governates (states) are virtually violence-free. But the July civilian casualty figures in Baghdad represent a troubling spike.
The overwhelming majority of these deaths were not caused by shootouts between MNF troops and the insurgents. They were massacres of unarmed innocents – women shopping at markets, day-laborers standing in line for work, children playing soccer.
The typical Iraqi massacre transpires one of two ways:
Sunni atrocity
A munitions expert, usually a former functionary of Saddam’s army or Mukhabaret, assembles a bomb, which is either detonated by a foreign suicide Jihadist, or planted in an urban slum by a fellow Ba’athist. The purpose of such an attack is not to take territory – it does not – nor to gain popularity – it does not – nor to kill the “occupier” – it does not. The object is simply to kill as many Shi’ite civilians as possible.
Shi’ite atrocity
The second style of Baghdad massacre works this way: Shi’ites strike back against Sunnis. These counter-strikes are less technologically erudite. The Medhi militia loads a car full of gunmen, who spray a Sunni neighborhood with automatic weapons fire. Or, alternately, militia-controlled Shi’ite units from the Interior Ministry don police uniforms, set up bogus checkpoints, and kill men with Sunni family names.
These massacres are quite horrific, and the redeployment of 3,500 U.S. troops and 400 military police to Baghdad reflects the seriousness of the situation.
What is at question is not whether the Baghdad massacres will stop – they will stop, as they have in most of Iraq – but who will stop them, and under what terms. The Al-Maliki government, backed by a parliamentary majority, by the 275,000 members of the Iraq Security Forces, and the military might of the MNF, will attempt to stop terrorism by political compromise with the Sunni groups that are, in truth, its instigators. If compromise fails, then the Shi’ite and Kurdish majority will, through official or unofficial means, kill or exile the Sunni resistance – and a lot of innocents as well.
The first solution enhances the long-term prospects of Iraqi democracy. The second would damage those prospects.
The Sunni bombers follow two strategies. The old Baathists want to use the constant threat of violence as a negotiating tool for amnesty from the new government, or power within it. The Sunni Jihadists want to incite Shi’ite counterstrokes, so that they can continue to recruit “wronged” Sunnis within Iraq. The jihadists will fight to the death. They will never negotiate with democracy.
Here’s the irony: To the extent that the insurgents’ recruitment strategy succeeds (i.e., using massacres to incite violence against their own community), the more likely it becomes that the Kurds and Shi’ites, now armed to the teeth, will tire of negotiations, and simply kill them. This is the opposite of what the Sunnis desire. But hey, this is the Arab world.
Of course, not all Sunnis, or even most, are party to the murderous decisions of their leaders. And this yields a second irony: The popularity of American troops is growing among Sunni citizens, particularly in Baghdad.
In the Times of London, Houmad Saffar writes:
Many of the mainly Sunni residents say they were frightened of the police and have welcomed the return of the U.S. army.
“We used to say we wanted the Americans to leave because we could look after ourselves; now we want the US army back to stop people being killed,” said one.
Oh Iraq! Will wonders never cease?