Wednesday, June 13, 2007

Genocide with deniability

Tom Hull on how the U.S. is starting to use the same tactics in Iraq it used against our Indians. Hey, it worked...

It's getting hard to think of things that could go wrong for the US in Iraq that haven't already gone wrong. New York Times hack John Burns is reporting that the US is arming Sunni Arab groups in Iraq, mostly ex-Baathists, on the promise that they'll use those weapons against Al Qaeda. No doubt they will, but also no doubt they'll use those same weapons against US troops, Iraqi troops, Shiite militias, each other, and anyone else who happens in the way. Burns was on PBS tonight talking about how this sort of strategy has been tried in the past and doesn't have a very good track record. He mentioned Vietnam, for instance, but didn't mention the one case where it did work: arming Indians on the old west frontier. The strategy is actually older than the US: Samuel Champlain did it when the French first arrived, and he may not even have been the first. The European settlers then, like the Americans today, were comfortable in the superiority of their arms, so they had few worries about the blowback their arms dealing might cause. Rather, they saw the big advantage of playing each side off against the other. The result was genocide with deniability, which is pretty much where Iraq is heading. Indeed, the new deals with Sunnis are dividends from previous US deals arming Shiite death squads.

It's often said that those ignorant of history are doomed to repeat it; here it looks like the Americans are hoping that works based on utterly misapplying their historical analogies. Last week Tony Snow looked into his crystal ball and discovered Korea as a hopeful model for Iraq. Exactly what makes Korea a success story isn't all that obvious. The war started 57 years ago, degrading quickly into a stalemate, with a ceasefire that has held for 54 years, despite the near-complete isolation and immiseration of the North, still controlled by a regime that periodically feels the need to threaten mass mayhem just to get the occasional handout of rice or oil. Even if Snow was just trying to point to hanging tough for 57 years and counting as an accomplishment, that's a pretty lame definition of success. Otherwise, the similarity is impossible to find. But it might make sense if you view North Korea as an Indian reservation -- not exactly subjugated, but pretty tightly contained. Now if we can only get those Iraqis packed away safely into a few reservations.

We did learn something from the old days. This time, we won't put the rez right on top of the oil like they did in Oklahoma.

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