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Who Saw That Coming?

Of course, the critics look right because we hardly seem to be winning the war in Iraq. But even here the critics are too smug. We have not won the war in Iraq because of something completely unforeseeable: widespread massacres of Iraqi civilians by other Iraqis and Muslims. We have never seen mass murder of […]

Of course, the critics look right because we hardly seem to be winning the war in Iraq. But even here the critics are too smug. We have not won the war in Iraq because of something completely unforeseeable: widespread massacres of Iraqi civilians by other Iraqis and Muslims. We have never seen mass murder of fellow citizens in order to remove an outside occupier. No Japanese blew up Japanese temples in order to rid Japan of the American occupier. No Germans mass murdered German schoolchildren and teachers to rid Germany of the American, British, French and Soviet occupiers.

The level of cruelty and evil exhibited by those America is fighting in Iraq is new. Had Iraq followed any precedent in all the annals of resistance to occupation, America would likely have been victorious in Iraq. It may just be impossible, if one is morally bound not to kill large numbers of civilians, to fight those who target their own civilians and hide among them. But George W. Bush had no way to foresee such systematic cruelty. ~Dennis Prager

Come now, Dennis.  Were sectarian and ethnic rivalries such an unknown unknown, as the great man might have said, that nobody could have foreseen large-scale massacres of Iraqis by Iraqis?  This is such a false claim that I wonder why Prager made it.  Yet again the experience of post-WWII occupations is trotted out to justify administration ignorance and incompetence–along with the ignorance of war supporters who went along with the whole “we did it in Japan and Germany, and we can do it again” mantra about post-war reconstruction in Iraq.

Completely unforeseeable?  Not to anyone familiar with the last century of Iraqi history, which is replete with massacres and atrocities of one group against another.  This was something true about Iraq long before Hussein came along.  Kurds massacred Assyrians in the closing days of the Ottoman Empire, Sunnis massacred Kurds later on, and on and on it goes.  The relatively recent events in Rwanda and Yugoslavia provided ample examples of the dangers of what might happen when a multiethnic polity begins to crack up.  Only someone completely oblivious to potentially explosive nature of the ethnic and sectarian make-up could claim that Iraqis killing Iraqis in large numbers was “completely unforeseeable.”  It was not.  It was foreseeable, and some people foresaw it and other potential dangers arising from an invasion.  Opponents of the war and also realists who may have supported the war but were at least aware of the risks and dangers of invading pointed to the dangers of the possible fragmentation of Iraq and the likelihood of sectarian killings and civil war in an artificial nation-state drawn up by colonialists. 

Say what you will about what you think future Iraq policy should be, but stop insulting our intelligence about how all of this was unforeseeable.  Those who did not foresee it failed to do so because they knew next to nothing about the country they were “liberating” and never saw the potential dangers coming because they were so smug and self-assured in the righteousness of their cause and the easy application of WWII lessons (most of which, incidentally, they never actually applied to Iraq).   

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