What we don’t know about Iraq

By EUGENE ROBINSON

August 20, 2007

WASHINGTON — The next time you hear confident assurances from the White House and its supporters that the “surge” of U.S. troops in Iraq is working and that something called “victory” is now within sight, remember the Yazidis.

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The bombings Tuesday looked more like an act of genocide, an attempt to erase as many Yazidis as possible from the face of the Earth. The motive for this atrocity might not have been political but religious; it might have been the work of Muslim fundamentalists who were trying to settle a centuries-old local grievance, rather than the work of Muslim fundamentalists trying to drive the Americans out of Iraq or establish a new caliphate in the Middle East.

The point is that here in Washington, we talk about Iraq as if we were intimately familiar with all its fractures, fissures and fault lines. The Bush administration touts as a breakthrough the recent decision of provincial Sunni Muslim sheiks to cooperate with U.S. forces — but it’s also possible that the sheiks are just maneuvering to be in a better position when the Americans eventually leave. The administration says there might be genocide if the United States pulls out — but it looks as if genocide has already been attempted.

Some war critics confidently predict that if the United States were to withdraw its troops, the al-Qaeda presence in Iraq would quickly become a non-factor — that foreign-born terrorists, having outlived their usefulness to the Sunni community, would be driven out or otherwise neutralized.

I happen to think this is a reasonable hypothesis. But I’m anything but confident.

There are those who will see Tuesday’s awful bombings as an illustration of why U.S. forces should stay in Iraq. I see the carnage as an illustration of how little the presence of 162,000 American troops can accomplish in a country the size of Iraq.

I don’t think anyone knows with certainty where “al-Qaeda in Iraq” ends and “the Sunni insurgency” begins. I don’t think anyone knows with certainty how the various Shiite factions will ultimately line up — or even whether a unitary Iraq, having been shattered by the U.S. invasion, can ever be reassembled.

What I do know is that anyone who says American forces have to stay in Iraq because they’re protecting the Iraqi people should tell that to the Yazidis. Those who are left.


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