I have no doubt Petraeus is doing his best and we should all wish him well. Maliki has managed to talk the Shiites into chilling for a while as well, which is a temporarily good thing. But the last two days reveal the evil of the Sunni and al Qaeda forces in Iraq as starkly as ever. We have news of an attack on a Shiite mosque in Hillah, with possibly 90 dead. Yesterday, they targeted the book market, providing this heart-wrenching quote from a local poet:
"There are no Americans or Iraqi politicians here — there are only Iraqi intellectuals who represent themselves and their homeland, plus stationery and book dealers. Those who did this are like savage machines intent on harvesting souls and killing all bright minds."
Yes, they are: they target mosques where another religious tradition worships; and a market where free people can have free thoughts. This is theocratic terrorism at its purest. In our absolutely justified anger at the incompetence of Bush, it remains a necessity to remind ourselves that he is not the cause of this evil; he has just allowed it to flourish because he is out of his depth and because his advisers never understood the central importance of order as the sine qua non of any occupation. The evil is the same evil that killed so many on 9/11. It is religious violence, driven by fundamentalist certainty.
The carnage forces us to answer the question of what to do. The surge cannot and will not stop this evil – unless it is a surge five times the size of the one we have and in a climate that existed three years ago, not now. You have to be clinically deluded, i.e. the president, to believe that this hasn’t gone past the point of no return. Policing these regions while these massacres occur under our noses will only delay the reckoning and implicate the U.S. more fully in the carnage. A withdrawal to less wracked regions and the borders, allowing the Shiite militias to do their grisly job of counter-attacking, and maintaining an active U.S. presence to intervene against al Qaeda in Anbar and Waziristan seems to me the most effective use of our resources right now. It’s not perfect or morally admirable. But it is, in my judgment, less imperfect and more morally defensible than our current band-aid.
(Photo: An Iraqi boy mounts a pile of burnt books, 06 March 2007 amid the rubble of Baghdad’s oldest book market, ripped by a car bomb attack the day before, killing 30 people, setting shops ablaze and leaving body parts scattered across the symbolic heart of Iraq’s intellectual life. At least 65 people were also wounded in the powerful blast on Mutanabi Street, an ancient center of learning and culture and a rare pleasure for the capital’s war-weary citizens. By Sabah Arar/AFP/Getty.)
The Dish 