"They Ran Out of People to Kill"

[Guest Gandalf Grey]

"They Ran Out of People to Kill"

 

By Cenk Uygur

Created Jul 17 2007 - 8:46am

 

One of the pieces of good news we keep hearing from the White House is that

sectarian killings are down. One US intelligence officer explained to the

Washington Post [1] why that might be the case:

 

"Now that the Sunnis are all gone, murders have dropped off. One way to put

it is they ran out of people to kill."

 

Wow. Just when you thought it couldn't get any worse in Iraq.

 

But this goes to a larger point. There is a quiet ethnic cleansing going on

now all over Iraq. That is why there have been over two million Iraqis who

have fled the country and up to as many as four million more who have been

internally displaced [2].

 

The Shiites are clearing out Sunnis from their areas and as the Washington

Post piece explains [3], even taking over neighborhoods that used to be 80%

Sunni before. The Sunnis are doing the best they can in clearing out Shiites

from their lands and the Kurds have been busy kicking Arabs out of Kirkuk

for quite some time now [4].

 

I'm not calling this a quiet ethnic cleansing because it isn't audacious or

traumatic to the people who live in Iraq. I'm calling it quiet because we

almost never hear about it.

 

The ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslavia was terrible and it prompted

us to get involved. But there was a lot of press attention in that

situation. Here, we have ethnic cleansing that appears to be far, far worse

than what happened in the former Yugoslavia, both in terms of degree and

magnitude. Yet, we almost never hear about it.

 

Why? Because it doesn't support any of the administration's talking points.

It shows beyond a shadow of a doubt that the central Iraqi government is a

joke. They are completely and utterly useless. They have no ability to

control any of this ethnic cleansing, nor do they appear to have a desire to

control it. In fact, there is ample evidence that they support it.

 

They're yanking our chain. They're wasting time pretending to work toward

reconciliation (and even pretending to be a government) while they buy time

for the Shiite militias to win the battles on the ground.

 

Now, all of a sudden, Maliki tells us that we are free to go [5]. Why?

Because now we are confronting the Mahdi army more in areas they control and

working with the Sunni tribal chiefs in the Anbar province. If we're going

to help the Sunnis and fight the Shiites, our work is done according to the

Shiite "central" government in Iraq. We are free to go.

 

I know why the administration keeps up the pretenses that the Iraqi

government is real and represents all of the Iraqis, not just the Shiites

(and to a lesser extent the Kurds). They have George Bush's ego to protect.

They can't admit that the whole thing is a folly and a ruse. They can't

admit that we have lost and that a unified Iraq no longer exists.

 

George Bush keeps warning about the consequences of failure. In fact, every

time he does this, he lays out the case for what a dramatic failure he is as

a president. Because we are already living with all of those consequences in

Iraq. And as the CIA has explained to him, the damage is "irreversible." [6]

 

So, the real question is why the press and the so-called opposition party

don't point this out on a regular basis. But this unfortunately is a

question we keep asking on almost every issue. And the answer is the same

every time:

 

We learn about it from the press in the first place, so they're obviously

doing a good job of finding the stories. But it is not necessarily their job

to keep repeating it and since the left has not built a media echo chamber

like the right has with Drudge, Fox News and right-wing talk radio, the

stories die on the vine. The only way they can be revived is if the

Democratic leaders keep talking about them and pointing out the facts. But,

as always, they seem clueless as to how do this - or even the very fact that

it is happening.

 

Until this vicious circle of complacency toward the truth gets broken, the

ethnic cleansing and many other relevant stories out of Iraq will remain

quiet. Yes, the drumbeat has grown loud over the years because the avalanche

of horrific stories out of Iraq is overwhelming. But if we knew the whole

truth, we could have done something about it years ago instead of trying to

pick up the pieces today.

 

I just hope we aren't saying the same exact thing a couple of years from

now.

 

The Young Turks [7]

 

 

 

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"A little patience and we shall see the reign of witches pass over, their

spells dissolve, and the people recovering their true sight, restore their

government to its true principles. It is true that in the meantime we are

suffering deeply in spirit,

and incurring the horrors of a war and long oppressions of enormous public

debt. But if the game runs sometimes against us at home we must have

patience till luck turns, and then we shall have an opportunity of winning

back the principles we have lost, for this is a game where principles are at

stake."

-Thomas Jefferson