by Patrick Appel
Juan Cole doesn't want the increased Iraqi civilian deaths in August to get in the way of withdrawing:
[T]he statistic will be taken advantage of by American hawks who object to the Status of Forces Agreement negotiated by George W. Bush with the Iraqi parliament, and affirmed by President Obama, and which specifies that all U.S. troops be out of Iraq by the end of 2011. For example, Ken Pollack at Haim Saban's Center within Brookings. Pollack makes the odd argument that the U.S. needs to remain in Iraq to prevent it from falling back into civil war. But the civil war he fears will recur is the one fought in 2006-2007, while the U.S. military was occupying Iraq! If it could not prevent the first one, how could the U.S. military prevent the second one? He cites some political scientists who he says argued that postcolonial states have high rates of recidivism in falling back into civil wars once they fight one, and that this rate is only ameliorated by the willingness of former colonial powers to intervene. This crackpot idea ignores the ways in which the colonial powers set these places up for civil wars in the first place. And I can think of lots of counter-examples. Nigeria's civil war did not recur, and British troops have not gone back there. Indonesia's massive civil conflict of the mid-1960s did not recur, and Holland has sent no brigades back to Jakarta. And in many cases, where civil wars have been transcended it has been despite imperial meddling (Nicaragua and El Salvador come to mind), not because of it.
The Dish 