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This week we witnessed a massive increase in violence in Iraq. In what appeared to be a coordinated series of bombings, more than 90 people were killed and hundreds maimed on Wednesday alone. What is the United Sates going to do about it?
In a word: nothing.
With American troops withdrawing, our agreements with President al-Maliki's government put severe restrictions on the things we can do, even to protect ourselves. We are focused on training Iraqis, supplying our troops---and leaving. This is not necessarily a bad thing, since with insufficient resources in Iraq and elsewhere we can't accomplish very much, but the violence does demonstrate that, by itself, the promise of democracy does nothing to insure peace.
Almost all the carnage is the result of sectarian enmity. In the north, Kurds are at odds with Arabs of all persuasions, particularly around Kirkuk, the multi-ethnic center of Iraq's oil economy. Some estimates place 40% of the country's massive reserves in the region, and they represent a delicious target, as if the Arabs needed any further encouragement to make life difficult for the Kurds.
In the area between Baghdad and Basra in the south, simmering tensions between minority Sunni, Saddam's sect, and the majority Shi'a will continue to erode the brief, initial calm of democracy. Basra is the only major port in Iraq, and most of the country's crude oil is shipped from there. More violence is on the way.
And in Baghdad, bombs continue to interrupt the tenuous calm, as insurgents try to demonstrate that the government is incapable of controlling a city, now on its own, previously made safe by American forces.
But none of this means that we should stay in Iraq. For one thing, we have other pressing missions and do not possess the resources to maintain a force large enough to keep things quiet in Iraq. For another, the electorate has a low threshhold of pain for the slow and often halting progress that accompanies unconventional wars of this type. And perhaps most important is that the president promised to withdraw from Iraq. He is now locked in battle with Congress over the issue of health care reform, and the weakness that the founders built into the role of the president is painfully evident. His role as the Commander-in-Chief is one of the few enumerated powers he possesses, and if he fails to exercise it and keep his promise, he will look weaker still.
Conventional wisdom held that a withdrawal of American troops from Iraq would result in a large increase in violence, and the sad news from Iraq demonstrates that once in a while conventional wisdom is right.
BREAKING NEWS: Scotland has disgraced itself by releasing Abdel Basset al-Megrahi, the Lockerbie bomber convicted of killing 270 people in 1988. He was sentenced to life in prison but is being returned to his home country of Libya because he is dying of cancer. Dying in prison would have been too good for him.
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