Newsweek Article on Ethnic Cleansing of Sunnis from Baghdad

Newsweek has an interesting article on how Shia Muslims are forcing Sunni Muslims out of Baghdad. Here is a quote from the article:

The surge of U.S. troops—meant in part to halt the sectarian cleansing of the Iraqi capital—has hardly stemmed the problem. The number of Iraqi civilians killed in July was slightly higher than in February, when the surge began. According to the Iraqi Red Crescent, the number of internally displaced persons (IDPs) has more than doubled to 1.1 million since the beginning of the year, nearly 200,000 of those in Baghdad governorate alone. Rafiq Tschannen, chief of the Iraq mission for the International Organization for Migration, says that the fighting that accompanied the influx of U.S. troops actually "has increased the IDPs to some extent." (IDP refers to internally displaced persons.)

So what about the success of the surge that the right-wing and the major media outlets keep telling us about? Here is an explanation about that from the same article:

When Gen. David Petraeus goes before Congress next week to report on the progress of the surge, he may cite a decline in insurgent attacks in Baghdad as one marker of success. In fact, part of the reason behind the decline is how far the Shiite militias' cleansing of Baghdad has progressed: they've essentially won. "If you look at pre-February 2006, there were only a couple of areas in the city that were unambiguously Shia," says a U.S. official in Baghdad who is familiar with the issue but is not authorized to speak on the record. "That's definitely not the case anymore." The official says that "the majority, more than half" of Baghdad's neighborhoods are now Shiite-dominated, a judgment echoed in the most recent National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq: "And very few are mixed." In places like Amel, pockets of Sunnis live in fear, surrounded by a sea of Shiites. In most of the remaining Sunni neighborhoods, residents are trapped behind great concrete barricades for their own protection.

This is a very interesting article, and also very sad, because it shows how much havoc our failure to plan for a post-Saddam Iraq has caused for Iraqis. Obviously, things were going to change once Saddam was removed. Sunnis are a relatively small portion of Iraq's population but had been exercising all of the political power. Just as obviously, though, Iraq didn't have to be like this.

According to this article in the Washington Post, taken from a new book that is coming out about Bush he thought that Americans would be greeted as liberators. This was based on three conversations he had with dissident Iraqis before the invasion. Here is a quote from that article:

Several of Bush's top advisers believe that the president's view of postwar Iraq was significantly affected by his meeting with three Iraqi exiles in the Oval Office several months before the 2003 invasion, Draper reports.

He writes that all three exiles agreed without qualification that "Iraq would greet American forces with enthusiasm. Ethnic and religious tensions would dissolve with the collapse of Saddam's regime. And democracy would spring forth with little effort -- particularly in light of Bush's commitment to rebuild the country." We now see how useful that information was for the United States.