Shiite-Sunni Imbalance Intensifies in Baghdad (Shiites are trying to "cleanse" Baghdad of Sunnis)

[sabra]

Source: NPR

All Things Considered, August 6, 2007 · The U.S. military says it believes that the Shia-led government in Baghdad is trying to cleanse the city of all Sunnis.

Sectarian violence has pushed most Sunnis into west Baghdad, and the Iraqi government is suspected of limiting basic services to the Sunnis in hopes of causing them to leave.

That would leave Sunnis even further unrepresented in the city, and it has cast a whole different light on the delay of provincial elections.

A government official claims, however, that Sunni politicians, fearful of losing to other Sunnis in the elections, are to blame.

Read more: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=12542843

[acmavm]

1. Some times articles seem so damn ridiculous because the

issues they are writing about are so damn obvious. This is one of them. And this was foretold way back before we dropped the first bomb on a defenseless population.

[rodeodance]

2. they might interogate MalikI?----did the military just NOW discover this??

.....The U.S. military says it believes that the Shia-led government in Baghdad is trying to cleanse the city of all Sunnis.

[Kagemusha]

3. Well before they simply blamed it on Sadr people.

But now they seem to think that the whole reason Sadr and Maliki were aligned in the first place was because Sadr was doing the Lord's work without Maliki's hands getting dirty.

[ck4829]

4. K&R

[gratuitous]

5. Quick primer, lest we forget

The Sunnis are the minority, and were heavily favored during Saddam's regime. While Saddam is largely remembered as "non-sectarian," his dictatorship and his policies favored the minority Sunnis. The Shiites, as you might imagine, weren't very happy about these circumstances, and despite the neo-con assurances that there wouldn't be a Hutu-Tutsi style bloodbath once Saddam was deposed, the Bush administration has done less than nothing to avoid it. Our military has tried mightily to keep a lid on the passions stirred up by decades of oppression, but there's a big difference between keeping peace by force and allowing people to find their own peaceful way out of such a situation.

Post-apartheid South Africa, while it had many problems of its own, never degenerated into the war of all-against-all that the supporters of apartheid feared. Mostly that was due to the moral (yeah, I said it) authority of Desmond Tutu and the apparatus he helped build to deal with some of the atrocities committed under apartheid. His book "No Future Without Forgiveness" should be required reading for every government official who gets the itch to depose a dictator.

But without that essential groundwork, the anger and the resentment built up since the 1970s will soon rule the day, and we have a choice to make: Stay in whatever capacity seems best to us (and with the crowd in Washington now, the only solution they see to any problem is a military one); or get out of the way and turn the situation over to someone else (and the crowd in Washington is so averse to letting someone else's judgment hold sway, they will surely leave Iraq to the mob). Right now, the only thing these lizard-brains can think of to do to ameliorate the mess they've caused is to hand out more and more guns and ammunition to the participants. It's pretty clear that this will only lead to more and more bloodshed, because while the Sunnis may be the minority group in Iraq, they're the majority of Muslims, and folks in Iran, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and elsewhere in the Muslim world aren't going to take too kindly to their co-religionists getting their asses kicked from Tikrit to Basra and back.

[aquart]

6. Which is why we said, "DON'T INVADE!"

Has anyone figured out that Dick Cheney is an idiot, yet?

[saigon68]

8. Idiot? How about DRAFT DODGER and WAR CRIMINAL?

[aquart]

9. Those are good, too.

[saigon68]

10. Yup ----- "Bring Em On" shouted the chimp

[FarCenter]

7. The Shiites were actively surpressed by Saddam

Saddam didn't just favor the Sunnis. Shiites were killed in large numbers by the Saddam regime.

In particular, at the end of the Gulf War, the Shiites rebeled against the Saddam government in the south. They were encouraged to do so by Bush I. However the "no-fly zone" policy permitted Saddam to use helicopters in the south, and the Shiites were slaughtered in large numbers.

Shiites also provided much of the cannon fodder for the war with Iran.

[winstonrazek]

11. history repeats

History repeats

[lonestarnot]

12. So genocide then?