http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090325/ap_on_re_mi_ea/ml_iraq_still_cleansed

Talk about shifting goalposts: Iraq isn’t a victory (or even a success at the moment) if it doesn’t turn out better than Bosnia?
I thought the Democrats and their Foreign Policy experts and success stories — Warren Christopher, Wesley Clark, Bill and Hillary Clinton, or Colin Powell – consider our efforts in Bosnia a stunning success?
Yet the AP tarnishes our remarkable comeback in Iraq as comparable to Bosnia, and uses that measure to find the results less than ideal.

I consider our efforts in the former Yugoslavia a fair-to-middling stalemate, if not ultimately a failure. We bombed more than we pacified, initially. However many Muslims we saved, however much we reduced outright slaughter and open civil war, we also tacitly condoned and accepted by failure to correct the resulting, very tidy, ethnic cleansing. The quilt went from a fine checkerboard patchwork to huge swaths of monochrome fabric, for sure.

Yet I would still consider the Balkan outcome worth its cost based on cost avoidance: what would have happened, ala Rwanda or Darfur, if we did nothing. What broader European war, or genocide, did we avert? However much the civilized world rightfully rejects the strategy or outcomes of ethnic cleansing, have we not accepted the historical outcomes of such effort as the darker side of civilization, and its progression?

When unyielding cultures and communities come into conflict over geography or political control or resources, they either make peaceful compromise, wage war, or one force tries to achieve their aims by pushing the other out of the way. Only the pacifist purists remain adamant in condemning those cultural and political forces that created Western Civilization.

In a perfect world – if you can find one – the Internationalist Diplomatic Community would be able to put the genie back in the bottle and restore the artificial political boundaries of former colonial powers. In the real world, that doesn’t often happen.

So whether the product of “fear” — or perhaps realism, common sense, or acceptance – displaced persons don’t want to return to homes in communities where their neighbors turned against them. But not killing is not killing, and peace and security nevertheless prevails in the absence of violence.

Else we must judge these inevitable conflicts on the basis of the human heart: where hate still lingers, no peace is possible. That formula may work for Brahmins or Gandhi wannabes or other One Worlders, but for the rest of us, that’s a standard a little bit beyond our upbringing.

Just a post-script. Only in AP World would they consider Juan Cole a prominent US expert on Iraq, rather than a highly vocal and persistent critic of US efforts.

Posted on March 25th, 2009 by Dadmanly
Filed under: Uncategorized