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Last Updated: Oct 7, 2008 - 8:53:01 AM |
John McCain is desperate to talk about the surge rather than the
splurge. His Iraq war is set to cost one trillion dollars, and his
deregulation-mania has cost hundreds of billions. So in order to
maintain his façade of being "tough on spending", he needs to shift the
subject. That's why he has tried to shrink the debate about the Iraq
War to one small question. Not: did Saddam have Weapons of Mass
Destruction? Not: did Saddam have links to 9/11? Not: why do 70 per
cent of Iraqis think the presence of US troops make them less safe and
they should go home now?
McCain knows he will lose those arguments, so he wants us to talk
solely about whether the surge of US troops last year has been
successful. But a hole was just blown in that argument – and blood is
rushing through.
Those of us who got Iraq wrong have a particular duty to honestly
describe what is happening now. A major study by the distinguished
scientific journal Environment and Planning A has just revealed the
real picture. The Republican nominee claims the US troops have stopped
the violence by their physical presence. To test this, Professor John
Agnew and his colleagues used the same techniques the US government has
adopted to monitor ethnic-cleansing in Burma and Uganda.
Here's how it works. When an entire ethnic or religious group is driven
out, they abandon their houses – and aren't there to switch on the
lights. Their areas become much more dark. If satellite images show
night-light remains the same in the areas dominated by one ethnic group
but significantly falls in mixed areas, you know ethnic cleansing is
happening.
So what happened in Iraq? Before, during and after the surge, the areas
that had always been Sunni and those that had always been Shia were
brighter than ever. But in the vast mixed areas, half or more of the
lights went out in the six months leading up to the surge. They then
stabilised in half-darkness. By the time the US troops arrived, there
were no more mixed areas left. The easy pickings – the Shia who lived
next door, or the Sunni who lived up the road – had all been attacked.
Sunni and Shia weren't killing each other any more because they had
retreated into vast enclaves, cleansed and armed, surrounded by
barriers manned by militias. Four million people had been driven from
their homes.
Professor Agnew explains: "Our findings suggest the surge has had no
observable effect, except insofar as it has helped to provide a seal of
approval for the process of ethno-sectarian neighbourhood
homogenisation that is now largely achieved." The new US troops have
simply built concrete walls between the newly-cleansed areas.
This study is a bleak vindication of my colleague Patrick Cockburn, who
has been almost alone in telling the human story of the cleansing.
Here's an example. In May 2006, four gunmen turned up at the house of
Leila Mohammed, a pregnant mother of three children in north-east of
Baghdad. "Be gone by evening prayers or we will kill you," they said.
She was a Shia in a Sunni neighbourhood, so she had to run, or die.
"Later I went back to try to get our furniture but there was too much
shooting and I was trapped in our house," Leila said. "I came away with
nothing." Now imagine millions of Leilas, and you have much of Iraq
today.
Those who try to get past the checkpoints and walls to their old
neighbourhoods find that the intercommunal hatred has not been soothed.
Cockburn gives one typical example: "When one couple, both Shia, went
last month to visit the house from which they had fled in the Sunni
al-Makanik district of Dora in south Baghdad, they were immediately
shot dead and their driver beheaded."
Yet Obama has failed to properly challenge this propaganda-surge about
the surge. He echoes the McCain line that "the surge has succeeded
beyond our wildest dreams", and shifts the conversation back to the
decision to invade in the first place. He has evidently concluded that
this case is too complex and too easily attacked with the ludicrous
charge that he is "criticising the troops." So McCain is getting away
with braying about the "great success" of wrapping one of the worst
programmes of ethnic cleansing of our time in towering concrete walls
of reinforcement.
Source:Ocnus.net 2008
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