Decline and Fall

Kevin Drum's onto something here: the casualty figures in Iraq mean very little unless you take seasonality into account, which means, basically, that the level of violence in Iraq has been consistently higher in Spring and Autumn than it has been in Summer and Winter. Remember this when the Administration trots out a comparison between violence levels in April 2007 and August 2007 to show that the surge is working. It isn't. To quote Jim Henley, " They're bullshitting us."

But there's more to it than that. It turns out that the numbers don't include casualty figures for civilian deaths if they were the result of Sunni-on-Sunni or Shia-on-Shia violence:

Unfortunately, there's simply no reliable data series for civilian casualties over the course of the war, and the data for this year in particular gives every indication of being massaged to within an inch of its life (intra-Shiite violence doesn't count, car bomb fatalities don't count, al-Qaeda attacks against Sunni tribes don't count, the figures change mysteriously from one report to the next, the supposedly lower numbers for August are classified, etc. etc.)

The Administration and Pentagon are so invested in the "sectarian violence" meme that their statisticians rule out the possibility that intra-sect killings are meaningful. Which of course they are, because this isn't merely a sectarian conflict. The battle lines have been drawn in so many directions that there's no way to accurately characterize it.

Tribal feuds, for example, are often completely non-sectarian. The massacres of Sunni policemen by Sunni Islamic militants and Ba'ath Party loyalists are clearly non-sectarian. Ditto for the ongoing battles between Badr and Jaysh al-Mahdi.

My experience in 2004-2005 interrogating almost no Shiites testifies to this. Of the hundreds of Iraqis I met, almost none of them were killing or otherwise terrorizing Shias. The vast majority of them weren't radical Muslims, bin Laden acolytes or Saddam hardliners; they were motivated by nationalism. They opposed the U.S. occupation of what they saw as their sovereign land (silly them!) so they lashed out in the most meaningful way they could: at the "collaborators" in their midst aiding and abetting the occupying, colonial power. It's basic insurgency doctrine, folks. In my experience, "religious fanaticism" is the veneer that some in Iraq, and even more in the West, use to cover what is essentially the struggle to get out from under the thumb of a strongman.

The Administration won't cop to that, though, because they need to be able to paint the current troubles as "those crazy Muslims and their backward ways." Any hint that these people are motivated by the same desire for self-government that every other people who have sought to break their yokes of bondage has been motivated by must be carefully avoided to maintain the illusion that we're "liberating" them. The media and the Right scoffed when some reality-based thinkers declared that "one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter," but deep down I think we all knew that was true. Ask the Irish, the Algerians, the French Partisans or the Sioux about that distinction.

This in no way excuses the use of suicide bombs and the targeting of innocents: these tactics are deplorable no matter who employs them. But they are effective, and that's something we still don't understand, four years after "Mission Accomplished."

Labels: Bush, Iraq, military, politics