900,000 Iraqis have left Iraq. While the Unites States Government dithers,
Iraqis have begun their own withdrawal strategy:
Fares al-Mufti, an official with the Iraqi Airways booking office, told The Times that the national carrier had had to lay on an extra flight a day, all fully booked. Flights to Damascus have gone up from three a week to eight to cope with the panicked exodus.
Muhammad al-Ani, who runs fleets of Suburban cars to Jordan, said that the service to Amman was so oversubscribed that that prices had rocketed from $200 (£108) to $750 per trip in the past two weeks.
Despite the huge risks of driving through the Sunni Triangle, the number of buses to Jordan has mushroomed from 2 a day to as many as 40 or 50.(...)
In one of the few comprehensive surveys of how many Iraqis have fled their country since the US invasion, the US Committee for Refugees and Immigrants said last month that there were 644,500 refugees in Syria and Jordan in 2005 -- about 2.5 per cent of Iraq's population. In total, 889,000 Iraqis had moved abroad, creating "the biggest new flow of refugees in the world", according to Lavinia Limon, the committee's president.
And the exodus may only just be starting.
This exodus is probably coming from very specific areas of the country, such as the Sunni Triangle, rather than, say, the Kurdish north. An outflow of this rate, combined with still escalating violence, has the potential to dramatically alter the demographic makeup of certain areas of the country (not to mention the way these new refugees will alter Jordan and Syria--so much for transforming the Middle East in a positive way). Which is, of course,
exactly what various groups on both sides want:
Shia gunmen are seeking to drive out the once-dominant Sunni minority and the Sunnis are forming neighbourhood posses to retaliate. Mosques are being attacked. Scores of innocent civilians have been killed, their bodies left lying in the streets.
There is certainly a moral case to be made that we cannot leave an area where so-called "ethnic cleansing" is taking place. However, we certainly also cannot maintain a peacekeeper function of keeping the two sides apart when much of the insurgency if fueled by our very presence. That just won't work. It also doesn't help when the Iraqi security forces, which we trained, could very well be colluding in what even Joe Biden has now called a "Nascent civil war":
We phoned the US military trainer attached to Iraqi security forces in the area. He said there was nothing to be done: "There's always shooting at night here. It's like chasing ghosts."
In fact the US military generally responds only to request for support from Iraqi security forces. But as many of those forces are at best turning a blind eye to the Shia death squads, and at worst colluding with them, calling the Americans is literally the last thing they do.
In theory, the peacekeeper function could be performed by a third-party, but over the last two years countries in the coalition have been pulling out, not signing up. Our function in Iraq was never supposed to be to serve as peacekeepers ala the former Yugoslavia, and out actions to date have made that function nearly impossible right now, both for us and for other nations.
Jack Murtha's solution still seems like the only viable path at this time. If we remove our troops and place them in a nearby country, then we take them out of harm's way, have the potential to seriously deflate the insurgency, and still have the potential to re-deploy in the event of imminent genocide or an overthrow of the Iraqi government. As our purpose in Iraq continues to shift, as the situation in Iraq continues to deteriorate, and as Iraqis begin to execute their own exit strategy, it may be the only sensible path remaining. If we don't do it soon, we will also have the ignominious distinction of suffering more American fatalities in Iraq (
2,678 and counting) than we suffered in the attacks on 9/11 (best estimate:
2,777-2,902 American fatalities out of
2,986 overall). This is not a good set of choice or results that we are set to face, but at least we can be happy that we don't live in West Baghdad.
