A provocative headline, clearly. But Jonah Goldberg’s excellent opinion piece in the Los Angeles Times puts it starkly. Pulling American troops from Iraq will almost certainly lead to a genocide.
In the words of New York Times reporter John Burns, quoted in the piece, “It seems to me incontrovertible that the most likely outcome of an American withdrawal any time soon would be cataclysmic violence, and I find that to be widely agreed among Iraqis, including Iraqis who widely opposed the invasion.”
A transcript of Burns’ appearance on the Charlie Rose show appeared on this blog:
JOHN BURNS: Well, I think, quite simply that the United States armed forces here — and I find this to be very widely agreed amongst Iraqis that I know, of all ethnic and sectarian backgrounds — the United States armed forces are a very important inhibitor against violence. I know it`s argued by some people that they provoke the violence. I simply don`t believe that to be in the main true. I think it`s a much larger truth that where American forces are present, they are inhibiting sectarian violence, and they are going after the people, particularly al-Qaeda and the Shiite death squads, who are provoking that violence. Remove them or at least remove them quickly, and it seems to me — controversial as this may seem to be saying in the present circumstances, while I know there`s this agonizing debate going on in the United States about this — that you have to weigh the price. And the price would very likely be very, very high levels of violence, at least in the short run and perhaps, perhaps – perhaps for quite a considerable period of time.
CHARLIE ROSE: This is what you said to me in January 2007. “Friends of mine who are Iraqis, Sunni, Shiite, Kurd — all foresee a civil war on the scale with bloodshed that will absolutely dwarf what we`re seeing now. It`s really difficult to imagine that that would happen, considering we`re talking about the fallout between the Sunnis and Shiite worlds, without Iran becoming involved from the east, without the Saudis who have already said in that situation they would move in to help protect the Sunnis majority in Iraq.”
Has anything changed in the six months since you said that? Five months?
JOHN BURNS: I don`t believe it has, no. I honestly don`t believe it has. You know, I don`t want to wade into the debate that`s going on in Washington because I understand that – that a very important element of that debate is weighing as everybody on both sides I think understands, the price of staying against the price of going. And there`s no doubt that the price of staying is very, very high in American blood, to begin with, and American treasure too.
But it seems to me incontrovertible that the most likely outcome of an American withdrawal any time soon would be cataclysmic violence. And I find that to be widely agreed amongst Iraqis, including Iraqis who strongly opposed the invasion. And especially amongst Sunnis, a minority who ruled here, whose power was usurped by the invasion and who now find themselves facing Shiite militias and 350,000 man and woman Shiite-led Iraqi security force, that`s to say army and police, which is overwhelmingly Shiite and would be likely, first of all, to disintegrate in the face of a civil war, but with its principal units falling on the Shiite, not the Sunni side of that war.
John Burns ended the segment with this disturbing anecdote:
And I`ll give you just one taste of that. A senior American official told me just the other night that he had been to see Tariq Al Hashimi, who – the Sunni vice president, a former Saddam army officer who never joined the Baath Party and left Iraq in the early `90s. In other words, a Sunni who – who has genuine credentials as a moderate.Tariq Al Hashimi asked this senior American official, “is your Congress really serious about withdrawing troops?” And the American official said to him, “you`d better believe that it may be. This is a serious debate and it`s very finely balanced, and it could – it could fall in favor of withdrawing those troops and withdrawing them on a fairly rigorous, tight schedule.” Tariq Al Hashimi responded to that by saying “then we will all be slaughtered,” then we will all be slaughtered.
So what is the correct “human rights” position? Stay in a miserable, bloody statis so that a cataclysmic eruption of violence may be staved off — at the cost of so many lives and futures? Or preserve those American lives (worth more, at least to Americans) than Iraqi lives, and bear the seemingly inevitable consequence? This question inevitably bears on what we do — or don’t do — when faced with coming genocides.
In Iraq, liberals flip on genocide – Los Angeles Times
Liberals used to be the ones who argued that sending U.S. troops abroad was a small price to pay to stop genocide; now they argue that genocide is a small price to pay to bring U.S. troops home… If you can justify causing genocide in order to end a nation-building exercise that — unlike similar efforts elsewhere — is fundamentally linked to our national interest, then how can you ever return to arguing that we should get into the nation-building and genocide-stopping business when it’s explicitly not in our interest?
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