The Possibility of Genocide

Right now, we have about 160,000 of our fellow citizens, men and women whose prerogative is to defend this country, but who find themselves caught in the middle of a civil war that has engulfed a country that we have no business being in, one that has nothing, absolutely nothing to do with the security of the United States of America. Of those scores of thousands of our soldiers, at least three come home every day in flag draped caskets. Every day, several hundred Iraqis are killed, by bombs, gunmen, mortars, executions, being mistaken for insurgents, or caught in the crossfire. As of today, 68,141 people have been reported killed, a number compiled by going through news reports spanning more than four years, adding up the total incident by incident. That number is certainly a minimum, and many more times that number have probably actually been killed.

As much as I hate to admit it, George Bush may have a point. I fear that it is the presence of so many American troops, that while doing nothing to improve the civil war, may be the only thing standing in the way of all out, full blown genocide. Already, sectarian death squads roam city streets, setting up roadblocks to check people's ID's, searching for those that belong to a different sect, so as to summarily and systematically execute them. In the past year, more than 30,000 people were reported killed in an explosion of ethnic, sectarian warfare. That is almost half the total reported killed in four years of constant fighting. If every foreign troop, at this point almost entirely American, was to leave Iraq, it may become the equivalent of a Middle Eastern Rwanda, with tolls that might dwarf the already horrific ones that we're seeing today, as different populations do everything possible to exterminate the others.

This leaves us with an intractable dilemma: do we continue with our open ended support of the war, despite the thousands more deaths and hundreds of billions of dollars that course would ensue, or do we abandon the country to a fate that we have prepared for, risking letting it be absolutely consumed from within? One thing that must be done is to demand accountability from the cabal responsible for this monstrosity, such people as George Bush, Richard Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, Donald Rumsfeld, Richard Perle, and their ideological compatriots. Ultimately, it is up to the people of Iraq to reject violence and constant internecine warfare, but it takes only a relatively small group of dedicated people to derail that process of peace and reconciliation. Yet it is us that bear responsibility for creating this situation that exists now. Possibly, the best of many awful solutions may be the partitioning of Iraq into three autonomous regions, one for Kurds, one for Shiites, and one for Sunnis. This segregation of the country may be the only way for the violence to eventually end. Yet this option is still fraught with danger and many possibly insurmountable difficulties. There are no good options available, each one involves many more deaths, and much more time, given what is happening now, that's unavoidable. The best one would be the one that leads to the least number of deaths, and the one that might eventually lead to a nation, or nations, that has a degree of stability, and is able to function without constant foreign military support. Nothing good can happen...