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THE REVERSE MIDAS TOUCH. As I noted last week, we are now in a position in Iraq where everything we do will lead to some new disastrous outcome for the Iraqi people. Under conditions of civil war and sectarian conflict, every intervention has the effect of strenthening some group at the expense of another, and thus strenthening their capacity to slaughter innnocents.The New York Times reports:
A growing number of Iraqis blamed the United States on Sunday for creating conditions that led to the worst single suicide bombing in the war, which devastated a Shiite market in Baghdad the day before. They argued that the Americans had been slow in completing the vaunted new American security plan, making Shiite neighborhoods much more vulnerable to such horrific attacks....The critics said the new plan, which the Americans have started to execute, had emasculated the Mahdi Army, the Shiite militia that is considered responsible for many attacks on Sunnis, but that many Shiites say had been the only effective deterrent against sectarian reprisal attacks in Baghdad�s Shiite neighborhoods. Even some Iraqi supporters of the plan, like Hoshyar Zebari, the foreign minister who is a Kurd, said delays in carrying it out had caused great disappointment.In advance of the plan, which would flood Baghdad with thousands of new American and Iraqi troops, many Mahdi Army checkpoints were dismantled and its leaders were either in hiding or under arrest, which was one of the plan�s intended goals to reduce sectarian fighting. But with no immediate influx of new security forces to fill the void, Shiites say, Sunni militants and other anti-Shiite forces have been emboldened to plot the type of attack that obliterated the bustling Sadriya market on Saturday, killing at least 135 people and wounding more than 300 from a suicide driver�s truck bomb.The Iraqi reaction is heart-breaking:
�I wish they would attack us with a nuclear bomb and kill us all,� [Mr. Abdul Jabbar] added, �so we will rest and anybody who wants the oil � which is the core of the problem � can come and get it. We can not live this way anymore; we are dying slowly every day.�What does Tony Snow have to say to such a man? Will anybody ask him? It is immoral to say we are staying for the security of the Iraqi people if every military move we make just results in increased insecurity for one group or another, which it must under the conditions now extant in Iraq. And military interventions that strenghten any sect at the expense of any other, even inadvertantly, will lead, as we see above, to Iraqis to blaming the U.S. for the destruction wrought by their Iraqi opponents -- and so to even stronger anti-American sentiment. And that seems likely to lead to even more direct attacks on American forces, from all sides.
--Garance Franke-Ruta
