Reihan:

The history of partitions in divided societies is long and ugly. That said, we don’t exactly think of Greece or Turkey, or even India or Pakistan, as failed states. We consider them troubled states that are fragile in many respects.

But if you were a British citizen c. 1922-23 seeing the utter devastation and forcible expulsion of the Greek and (the few remaining) Armenian communities in Anatolia, or again a British citizen c. 1947 watching the horrendous bloodshed after Partition, you wouldn’t exactly be congratulating Lloyd George and the other Allied leaders for their brilliant plan to let Venizelos launch his military operation nor would you be cheering the Atlee Government for their clever handling of Indian and Pakistani independence.  Even if dividing these populations by religion made the most sense for these nations at the time–and this is very debatable–it was a solution premised on the assumption that mass slaughter would result anyway if it were not so arranged.  These are “successful” resolutions to what are already catastrophically failed policies. 

Of course, the expulsions in these cases were not reversed, and to a large extent this is why Greece and Turkey were able to come to terms at all during the interwar period, but the legacy of that experience contributed to internal political instability inside Greece for decades, arguably all the way until 1974 and perhaps even longer than that.  I don’t have to remind anyone about the enduring danger of instability along the Indo-Pak border.  Also, while we may not now think of these states as failed states, and may never have done, by most measures Iraq is a failed state (the third worst in the world as of last year) and to the extent that we can compare Iraq with those four Iraq is most like the most basketcase-like of the four, Pakistan.          

Before this Reihan said:

This is an aspect of the withdrawalist critique that I find particularly frustrating.  “Aha! But you didn’t turn Baghdad into a harmonious multifaith enclave of cosmopolitan prosperity! Yet!” Right.

Yet to a much greater degree than today, as Reihan knows, Baghdad used to be a relatively integrated city that saw intermarriage and mixed neighbourhoods filled with members of different sects.  Sectarian identity did not used to possess quite the same political significance that it acquired immediately before and ever since the 2005 elections, but once it became a badge that determined where you could live, who your friends could be and what kind of name you should give when confronted by armed goons all of that went to pieces.  Harmonious and cosmopolitan it may not have been, but it was far more so in the “bad old days” than it has been since, which is really what is behind Klein’s point about the cleansing of sectarian enemies out of mixed neighbourhoods.  Destructive sectarianism has restored some measure of peace in the same way that the burning of the Greek and Armenian quarters in Smyrna more or less ended the Greco-Turkish conflict, which is to say in the worst possible way. 

The point isn’t that Baghdad has not become a multifaith enclave, but that it used to be something like that and was then turned into a highly segregated and divided city thanks to the mix of invasion, insecurity and sectarian-cum-democratic politics.  Hence, the nightmarish violence of 2006 has subsided into merely horrible because most of the potential victims of new sectarian violence have been pushed into new parts of the country, fled to Syria and Jordan or elsewhere or were killed in the first waves.  And this is dubbed success.  This was the point Klein was making here–the causes of reduced violence are many and some have nothing to do with the additional brigades, and some are the after-effects of the magnificent failure of the occupation to fulfill its obligations to secure the population of the country it ostensibly controlled.  Meanwhile, “surge” defenders would very much like to credit the change in tactics with most or all of the improvements, and then allow this reduction in violence to make it seem as if something fundamental had changed about a society in which armed gangs were butchering civilians just a year and a half ago for happening to be in the wrong district.  That is what I call an unpersuasive case.