Mick Hartley

As another piece of sectarian barbarism barely struggles to make the news, here’s Hitchens on Bush’s surge in Iraq:

During the war in Kosovo, I shared a flagon of slivovitz with an especially triumphalist Kosovar Albanian who exulted at what he was seeing. Decades of being pushed around and ground down by the Serbian supremacists and then, suddenly, “Guess what? We get to f— the Serbs and to do it with Clinton’s dick!” (That twice-repulsive image took up a horrible tenancy in the trashy attic of my mind, where it is still lodged.) Matters in Kosovo had been allowed to decay to the point where one either had to watch the cleansing of the whole province by Slobodan Milosevic or, yes, allow NATO and the U.S. Air Force to become, in effect, the air force of the Kosovo Liberation Army. On balance, the latter option was better, while the geographical and demographic scale of the problem was more manageable. Matters in Iraq have degenerated much faster and much more radically than that; now the Shiite majority wants to screw the Sunnis with Bush’s (more monogamous, for what that’s worth) member. The picture is hardly a prettier one.

A few months ago, I wrote here that the coalition potentially acted as a militia for those who didn’t have a militia. I got quite good feedback for that formulation from American soldiers and from Iraqis, too. In large parts of Iraq, still, there are people who dread what might happen in the event of our withdrawal—people to whom in some sense we remain pledged. A surge of any size will be worse than useless if it loses us that moral advantage. In all the recent ignorant burbling about another Vietnam, it ought to have been stressed that there is just one historical parallel worth noting: the early identification of the Kennedy brothers with the Catholic faction in Saigon over the Buddhist one. This is one mistake that we can and must avoid repeating, and Maliki’s regime, with its Dawa and Sadrist allies, should be made to know it.