More fresh thinking from Obama on Iraq

A couple of weeks ago the Republicans ridiculed Barack Obama for saying that if we pulled out of Iraq, and if al Qaeda then took over, the U.S. could invade Iraq again. In fact, Obama’s idea in its broad outline was reasonable, at least from my perspective, as it corresponded with my long-time theme that invading a Muslim country for three weeks once every five years would be vastly less costly than occupying and running the country in perpetuity.

Now the Obama team promotes another idea on Iraq that VFR has spoken well of, and again the neocons instantly trash him. Powerline passes on the news that

Obama and [his senior foreign policy advisor Samantha] Power are contemplating the promotion of ethnic cleansing in Iraq. During a BBC broadcast, Power revealed that when President Obama retreats from Iraq, his plans might very well include “moving potentially people from mixed neighborhoods to homogenous neighborhoods” if that is their choice.

Powerline calls this ethnic cleansing. It could also be called ethnic and religious partitioning, which some people say is the only basis for long-term peace and stability in the fatally divided country of Iraq. At the very least, it is not an inherently irrational idea. It offers a reasonable alternative to the Bush-McCain-neocon-Powerline policy of keeping our forces in Iraq forever, which in turn is based on the belief that Iraq is and must remain a single unitary state until the end of time.

While I share Powerline’s disdain for Obama advisor Samantha Power (who once referred to “Sharafat,” thus combining the names of Sharon and Arafat and suggesting a complete moral equivalence between Israel and the Palestinians), that doesn’t mean that every idea coming from Power and Obama is necessarily bad. For the neocons contemptuously to dismiss any thinking that departs from Bush’s Thousand Year Iraq shows how lost they are. It gives us an all-too-clear picture of what they will do to this country if they remain in power, and as long as the remain in power. Which is why they must be removed from power.

At VFR I have written favorably of the partition idea, which has been consistently pushed by Randall Parker of Parapundit.

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Steven Warshawsky writes:

Did you read this interesting essay by Jerry Muller on Real Clear Politics last week (from Foreign Affairs)? Among its main points is the argument that Europe has enjoyed more than 60 years of relative peace, because during the first 50 years of the 20th century the various ethnolinguistic groups that comprise Europe were separated through various, often violent, means. This would tend to suggest that dividing up Iraq along competing ethnic/religious lines (primarily Shia and Sunni) might be a useful step towards establishing a more peaceful society there. Of course, this does not mean that these groups would become any more favorably disposed towards Americans, Christians, Jews, etc.

What is missing from Muller’s essay, however, and what I think is the more important question, is at what point do majorities and minorities no longer find it possible to coexist in the same society? After all, none of the countries in Europe are perfectly homogenous. What is the “tipping point” that leads to conflict, violence, and separation? And how can we predict when tyrannical majorities will decide to drive out or exterminate undesirable minorities (e.g., Germans against Jews), or when ambitious minorities will embark on a violent campaign to compel the majority to recognize their distinct way of life (militant Muslims versus ordinary Europeans)?

Chris B. writes:

Would ethnic partitioning in Iraq (even if voluntary) qualify as an unprincipled exception to the multicultural universal state the Neocons believe in?

Mark Jaws writes:

I too, agree with Obama’s ethnic partitioning of Iraq. We should encourage the dissolution of as many unworkable multi-ethnic nations as possible—to include, one day, our own. And the way Latinos are streaming into our country, that day is not too far off in the future.

Gerald M. from Dallas writes:

Perhaps someone should point out to Powerline that ethnic cleansing of neighborhoods is one of the most important reasons violence levels have come down in Iraq in recent months. Reporters have noted many times that as Sunnis fled mixed neighborhoods, leaving them virtually all Shia, and Shias fled other mixed neighborhoods, leaving them almost all Sunni, the violence levels in these neighborhoods greatly declined.

Indeed, ethnic cleansing is the reality behind the “we are winning” propaganda about what a great success the surge has been. But you never hear about this process from General Petraeus or anyone else in the administration because it isn’t part of the officially approved surge (even though much of the surge’s “success” is based on it). Ethnic cleansing challenges the Bush / neocon model of a unitary, multicultural, integrated, “can’t we all just get along” Iraq that is the linchpin of their plan to remake the Middle East.

From a slightly different angle, while pleasantly surprised that Obama’s campaign understands “ground truth” in Iraq well enough to broach the idea of homogeneous ethnic neighborhoods, I wonder if they fully understand how this idea challenges some of their ideas about multiculturalism, at least those which apply to this country.

LA replies:

Gerald raises a very interesting point. As I’ve said before (following Benjamin Schwarz’s eye-opening article on multiculturalism in the Atlantic many years ago), the U.S. must impose multicultural solutions on other lands in order to validate our own multiculturalism. Multiculturalism means that a society consists of a collection of significantly different yet somehow equal and mutually harmonious ethnocultural groups. Partition is the opposite of multiculturalism: it’s saying that significantly mutually incompatible groups cannot live together acceptably within the same borders. For Obama to promote partition suggests, ironically, that the most left-wing (and presumably multiculturalist) candidate in this race sees the problems of multiculturalism better than the neocons, who have always defined themselves by their opposition to multiculturalism in favor of universalism, but which universalism (as I’ve shown, oh, about a thousand times) leads inevitably to multiculturalism, since putting groups together in one society on the basis that everyone is ultimately the same and can assimilate, when in reality they are not ultimately the same and cannot assimilate, means that you end up with a society consisting of mutually incompatible groups. The neocons, who are to a man and woman profoundly dishonest ideologues, have never admitted that yesterday they were embracing universalism and that today they’re embracing its opposite, multiculturalism.

LA continues:

However, in response to Gerald, while there was a lot of voluntary and involuntary ethnic partitioning going on last spring, I have not read about it more recently, and it wouldn’t make sense. The partitioning was a response to the threat of death coming from whichever was the dominant group in each neighborhood. If the violence has gone down, it stands to reason that so would the ethnic partitioning.

We need more facts on the amount of partitioning that’s been going on over the last 14 months.

Gerald M. replies:

To your first comment I would add only that, to make the multicultural model work (whether or not one continues to pretend the model is based on universals) an authoritarian, even totalitarian government is required. The former Communist regimes in Yugoslavia and the U.S.S.R. come to mind, and of course Saddam’s in Iraq itself. Another one of the blessings of diversity, one might say.

To your second comment, I would agree that a map or chart or some sort of graphical presentation showing us the changes in Shia / Sunni population ratios in Baghdad neighborhoods, related to changes in the violence levels, would be illuminating. I do recall (I watched all of it that was on C-span) that nothing of this sort was presented by Petraeus or Crocker in their much ballyhooed testimony to Congress a few months ago, probably exactly because of the questions it would raise about the validity of the administration’s vision for the kind of society Iraq should be. They did emphasize the decline in sectarian violence, but they did not (dared not?) link it to ethnic cleansing. All our knowledge of ethnic cleansing during this time came from the media, not the administration. [LA replies: Randall Parker at Parapundit had a great deal on the ethnic cleansing at the time (approximately spring 2007), drawn from mainstream media sources.] The only reasons Petraeus and Crocker gave for the decline in violence were the increased American troop presence and the walling off of Baghdad neighborhoods, one from another. This is one reason I don’t trust Petraeus; one might expect some daylight between his explanations and the ones presented by Bush and the neocons, but there never is.

You are probably right that partitioning has slowed down in recent months; but I believe it was a huge factor in the creating conditions which the surge has exploited. Lastly, I would echo what I’ve heard several reporters who have been in Iraq a long time say: the situation there is so complex, so confused, and so opaque to Western eyes that anyone who claims he really knows what’s going on is lying through his teeth.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at March 06, 2008 02:04 AM | Send