While the Anbar awakening, the truce with Sadr, and the Surge are widely cited as chief drivers of reduced violence in Iraq, there’s also some discussion on the impact of ethnic cleansing (or sectarian cleansing in this case). Namely, that in Baghdad pre-surge sectarian groups consolidated their control over various neighborhoods, driving out or killing members of other groups. The goals of these sectarian killers had been largely achieved pre-Surge, which suggests that the drop in violence in Baghdad may also have occurred in part because the bad guys had what they wanted.
Steve Biddle, Michael O’Hanlon, and Ken Pollack pushed back against this argument in Foreign Affairs
It is worth noting that separation resulting from sectarian cleansing was not the chief cause of the reduction in violence, as some have claimed. Much of Iraq remains intermingled but increasingly peaceful. And whereas a cleansing argument implies that casualties should have gone down in Baghdad, for example, as mixed neighborhoods were cleansed, casualties actually went up consistently during the sectarian warfare of 2006. Cleansing may have reduced the violence somewhat in some places, but it was not the main cause..
However, as Spencer Ackerman among others notes, this makes no sense. Of course ethnic cleansing leads to more violence while it’s occurring, the question is whether the violence dropped after the polarization of Baghdad neighborhoods was done. I suspect what they’re responding to is the no longer widely discussed idea of partitioning Iraq. It’s a fair argument to say that partition might provoke further ethnic cleansing and thus cause a great deal of violence even if it ultimately stabilizes the situation. But that point is irrelevant to the discussion of the recent drop in violence in Iraq. Regardless, Ackerman goes on to make a more important point:
But there’s actually a broader point to make. Ethnic cleansing is a crime against humanity. The U.S. quite rightly intervened in the Balkans in the 1990s to stop it. The horrors of ethnic cleansing are unfathomable to those who haven’t experienced them. What you really, really shouldn’t do is treat other people’s ethnic cleansing as a debaters’ point. It’s perverse, isn’t it, the way that ethnic cleansing that occurred during a U.S. occupation can be treated so nonchalantly by Washington polemicists.
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