One of the amazing things about the invasion of Iraq is that not only was it charted by neoconservatives, many of them Zionists who sought to secure Israel, but that unconsciously or not, these folks inhaled the Israeli view of dealing with the Arab world: occupation, iron wall, they only respect force, they are terrorists, radical Islam, etc. And so the U.S. quickly experienced what the Israelis have–suicide terrorism (though our politicians, some of them, had the guts to say the violent deserved a political solution). Well, add to that list ethnic cleansing.
No I know that Zionists are not alone in liking ethnic cleansing, Arab societies have pursued it too.
But what is fascinating is that the Mood of the Iraqi invasion, its liberation, has emulated the Mood of the Jewish liberation of Palestine: the Israeli war of independence in 1948, when suddenly the elite of Arab urban culture fled Haifa in buses and Jaffa in boats. This is the lesson of a fresh study showing that pacification in Baghdad has been achieved largely through ethnic cleansing. And blogger M. Duss specifically goes after Frederick Kagan, the American Enterprise Institute's resident poohbah of war on the same issue:
Kagan’s claim that Baghdad “remains a mixed city,” severely understates
both the drastic transformation of the city’s sectarian make-up and the
suffering that attended that transformation. It also casually ignores
the fact that one of the most intense and violent periods of sectarian
cleansing took place under the aegis of the military escalation Kagan
now claims credit for.
I don't mean to demonize Israel on this score. It's awful, so are the Arabs and the Tamils and the Turks. The point is that Israel has been so exalted in American thinktanks that the war planners couldn't see its true fault. The planners of the Iraq war were corrupted by religious nationalism, and could never condemn the Israeli occupation– and thus they have been condemned to repeat it, with all its charming sequelae.
