WHEN the history of the shambles into which Bush’s ignorant invasion plunged Iraq comes to be written, few atrocities will better illustrate sheer savagery than Wednesday’s brutal bombings of two Yazidi villages in the Kurdish-controlled north of the country.
This Iraqi community is among the poorest of the poor. To blast apart their mud-brick homes was an act of extreme wickedness. If, as feared, maybe 500 Yazidis have perished, it will be the single worst outrage in a campaign that has already notched up a series of lows in base human behavior. It must be wondered how these thugs manage to sleep at nights. What cause could ever justify such massive shedding of innocent blood? All decent observers are by now running out of ways to express their horror and disgust at the barbarous activities of the killers in Iraq as well as the cynical revenge attacks on Sunnis by Shiite death squads.
Yet the US administration that unleashed this violent anarchy can express no more than passing regret for any of the victims. Its military prefer to measure the bloodshed in dispassionate strategic terms. The commander in Iraq, Gen. David Petraeus preferred to see the slaughtered Yazidis are proof that the “surge” was driving Al-Qaeda out of its old strongholds and forcing them to operate in less-protected areas.
Might it have been too much to imagine that the Pentagon planners could have anticipated this development at the outset? If they were going to try and clamp down on terrorist activity in big towns and cities, they surely expected the men of violence to regroup and attack softer targets. Why then was no provision apparently made, first, to stop killers moving men and explosives out of their heartlands and, second, to protect communities such as the Yazidis, who had until now been largely unaffected by the violence?
It is another sorry tale of poor and unimaginative planning in a campaign that has always been more about saving face and oil interests than in bringing liberty and stability to Iraq.
The local Kurdish authorities also have some questions to answer. Terror bombings in their autonomous region have brought heightened security precautions. But four vehicles, one of them a fuel tanker, packed with explosives were able to pass undetected through checkpoints until they reached these two unfortunate villages.
This latest terrible carnage is also an indictment of the failure of the Maliki government to deliver on its promises of a broad-based administration that embraces all moderate political opinion. With every week that passes without a proper, effective government, the Americans are being given an ever stronger excuse to blame the consequences of their own blunders on Iraqis.
The speech — the one where Bush sorrowfully regrets that despite his best efforts the Iraqis proved to be the ungrateful agents of their own destruction and therefore the US must leave and let them get on with it — has probably already been written.
