Getting It Backwards
Ken Pollack, Michael O’Hanlon and Stephen Biddle have published a massive Foreign Affairs article (and a shorter Times Op-Ed) summarizing their recent trip to Iraq, and calling for (surprise!) maintaining high levels of combat forces in Iraq. I won’t admit to having gotten through the entire piece yet, but this one bit, flagged by Barron YoungSmith seems a tad dodgy:
“It is worth noting that separation resulting from sectarian cleansing was not the chief cause of the reduction in violence, as some have claimed. Much of Iraq remains intermingled but increasingly peaceful. And whereas a cleansing argument implies that casualties should have gone down in Baghdad, for example, as mixed neighborhoods were cleansed, casualties actually went up consistently during the sectarian warfare of 2006. Cleansing may have reduced the violence somewhat in some places, but it was not the main cause.”
Maybe I’m missing some crucial piece of context, but this looks like a piece of evidence for the ethnic cleansing thesis. Violence should have gone up when the ethnic cleansing happened, that is, after all, what ethnic cleansing is. Violence would then go down after “mixed neighborhoods were cleansed.” And if you eyeball the famous charts of violence and causalities, it sure looks like that happened. Also, in their op-ed, they claim that violence dropped from its 2006 peak in part because of a “systematic response to a new strategic landscape created by 2006’s sectarian bloodletting.”
UPDATE: Clearly Matt Yglesias doesn’t read this blog.
