Spinning Into The Darkness

The academic Juan Cole appears to function as something of a one man truth squad in regard to Iraq. It probably helps that he is fluent in Arabic and can monitor media that our public is by and large not being exposed to. All accounts coming out of Iraq via non-US media have reflected an unhappy situation, steadily trending toward being darker and unhappier. The government in Baghdad has put a ban on photos of bombings and has stopped releasing figures for the number of corpses delivered to the morgue in Baghdad, apparently on the theory "out of sight, out of mind".

This is a sobering reminder that even if we can't see it happening, it hasn't stopped happening. Nor does it appear to be heading toward a "soft landing", which I predict will become the motto of the last months of the Bush administration. The President himself made that clear when he noted that the stock market almost certainly would stabilize and have a "soft landing". I leave it to others to sort out the significance of that becoming viewed as a positive outcome. If one were to be snide, one might liken it to the term "easy death", as something to give thanks for. Yes, it certainly is, but only in contrast to a "difficult death", if those are the only two choices. If "happy life" is a third option I suspect most of us would opt for that alternative.

Juan Cole performs a valuable service by reminding us what the deaths in Iraq would be equivalent to in the United States. Here is a further comparison he did not make. With two million refugees having left Iraq, and 50,000 more leaving each month, that is a diaspora of Biblical proportions. The current population of Iraq is 27.5 million. The population of the US is 301 million. To make the math easier one could just say the US has roughly ten times as many people. If we accept that conservative figure, the flight from Iraq of over two million of its citizens to Jordan and Syria would be equivalent to over twenty million Americans, many of them professionals, fleeing to Canada and Mexico. With another 500,000 leaving every month. According to other estimates, an equivalent number of Iraqis are "internally displaced", in most cases by sectarian strife. The equivalent would be twenty million Americans moving from their homes to another area of the country to avoid violence.

Add in half of the population being unemployed and a 43% rate of those living below the poverty line and you have a recipe for a truly horrific civil war and sectarian genocide. Does that seem unlikely? When India was partitioned at the end of its colonial era, into Pakistan and India, the movement of groups of different religions and ethnicity sparked riots and massacres that are said to have cost a million lives. Something similar could happen in Iraq, and if something like that does happen, the United States will bear the responsibility for having set in motion the events that lead to that outcome.

Arthur