Award for most depressing read in the Sunday paper today goes to Jeffrey Gettleman’s piece from Baghdad, in which the New York Times correspondent, returning to Iraq after a year away, describes the new state of affairs there.
It’s true that American soldiers are still dying, but the focus of the bloodshed has changed… By conservative counts, nearly 200 civilian men have been executed in the past two weeks and dumped on Baghdad’s streets. Many have been hogtied. Some have had acid splashed on their faces. Others have been found without toes, fingers, eyes… This new wave of executions was different. It was more sadistic and less selective. These people weren’t rounded up because they were important. They were tortured and killed simply because of their religion. And because most of them were Sunni Muslim Arabs, there was no response from the Shiite-led government. |
This is the situation that our government is unwilling, for profoundly self-interested reasons, to label “civil war.” It is the worst-case outcome for the American misadventure in Iraq, and we are rapidly sinking toward it.
Gettleman writes: “I recently met a Sunni man who used to be virulently anti-American. He showed me postmortem pictures of his younger brother, who had been kidnapped by death squads and had holes drilled in his face. ‘Even the Americans wouldn’t do this,’ he said.”
Holes drilled in his face.
In the early months of the Iraq occupation, the insurgency was using car-bombs to blow up U.S. soldiers; every now and then, there’d be a beheading. American true believers in the war, stranded by the failure to find weapons of mass destruction, would point with anger to this barbaric behavior. “These are the kind of beasts we’re fighting,” they’d cry, and, stoking their anger with outrage at such cruelties, they would find new resolve to pay the war’s escalating costs in dollars and blood.
So what are we to make of people who drill holes in victims’ faces? What new awful depths are trap-dooring open below us? How about this: These new sadists aren’t even on the same team as the others we’ve been fighting. The car-bombing insurgency, the “Al Qaeda in Iraq” beheaders led by Zarqawi, are Sunnis; the new Baghdad slaughterers are radical Shiites. They’re fighting each other, the American-backed Iraqi “unity” government can’t or won’t stop the miserable carnage, and U.S. forces are either unwilling or unable to step in. (Here’s Gettleman’s dispatch for the Monday paper: “American officials are now saying that Shiite militias are the No. 1 problem in Iraq, more dangerous than the Sunni-led insurgents who for nearly the past three years have been branded the gravest security threat.”)
The Samarra attack last month now appears to be the match that lit this civil conflagration. Gettleman, again:
Not enough can be said about the attack on a Shiite shrine in Samarra last month. That explosion opened a cycle of revenge that seems to have split modern Iraqi history. There is before Samarra and after. Before Samarra, many Iraqis tried to play down Sunni-Shiite tensions. Since Samarra, they live in mortal fear of them. |
Perhaps it’s time for the American leadership to stop the game of delusional behavior, admit that Iraq is now in the early stages of a civil war, and begin figuring out how to get our forces home before the Sunni-Shiite crossfire decimates them. Or are we going to keep spending $100 billion a year to garrison Iraq with an army that can’t even stop people from drilling holes in faces?
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