Friday, September 07, 2007

Ethnic cleansing in Iraq?

Fareed Zakaria on ABC’s World News Tonight:
Gibson: If we go through some sort of a reduction strategy, are we opening things up for some kind of genocide, ethnic cleansing that will go on, and we'll simply have 50,000, 60,000, 70,000 troops standing by and watching this?

Zakaria: No, because one of the dirty little secrets about Iraq is that Iraq has increasingly been ethnically cleansed. It's sad to say, but the American Army has presided over the largest ethnic cleansing in the world since the Balkans.

If you look at Baghdad, it is essentially a very cleansed city. It is, the Shia and Sunni communities have been separated by the river. You look increasingly around the areas that were once intermixed. They're no longer mixed. That explains, by the way, one of the reasons why violence has been reduced & So, it seems unlikely, when people say bad things are going to happen if we leave, bad things have already happened, where were you for the last four years.

It doesn't seem that likely that we're going to end up seeing some kind of massive genocide. The ethnic cleansing has happened.
It should be noted that an estimated 4.2 million Iraqis have been forced from their homes – approximately 2.2 million displaced internally and 2 million fleeing to other countries creating the biggest refugee crisis in the Middle East since 1948. (And of these 4.2 million, the United States has resettled 719.) Baghadad has essentially become two separate cities divided by a river due to ethinic cleansing during the past year and a half.

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