Responsibility

BAGHDAD, July 9 — A mob of gunmen went on a particularly brazen rampage through a predominantly Sunni Arab district of western Baghdad on Sunday, pulling people from their cars and homes and killing dozens in what officials and residents called a spasm of revenge by Shiite militias for the bombing of a Shiite mosque on Saturday.

Hours later, two car bombs exploded beside a Shiite mosque in another Baghdad neighborhood in an act of apparent retaliation. Officials said the blasts killed at least 19 people and wounded 59.

According to some residents and Sunni Arab officials interviewed by telephone, the gunmen, whom they accused of being members of a feared Shiite militia, set up checkpoints around the neighborhood, indiscriminately pulled scores of Sunni Arabs from their homes and cars, and killed them on the street. Other bodies were found with their hands bound behind their backs and gunshots in their heads, residents said.

-The New York Times 

Article 1

The Contracting Parties confirm that genocide, whether committed in time of peace or in time of war, is a crime under international law which they undertake to prevent and to punish. 

Article 2

In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such: 

(a) Killing members of the group; 

(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; 

(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; 

(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; 

(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

 

Article 3

The following acts shall be punishable: 

(a) Genocide; 

(b) Conspiracy to commit genocide; 

(c) Direct and public incitement to commit genocide; 

(d) Attempt to commit genocide; 

(e) Complicity in genocide.

-UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide

Food for thought, no?  Supposedly reasonable minds make the argument that events in Iraq have not yet devolved into civil war, let alone genocide- reasonable, yet hardly convincing.

I’m not convinced these reasonable minds know where they would draw the line between ostensibly low-scale “sectarian violence” (note sanitary media catchphrase) and civil war.  According to the widely referenced Correlates of War project (yes my snickering friends, the COW), a civil war is constituted by a conflict involving a state and one or more internal separatist entities resulting in more than a thousand deaths.  Since this past Sunday, around 300 people, the majority noncombatant civilians, have died in the ongoing Iraqi non-civil war.

While I do think it is reasonable to argue that the Iraq situation does not yet constitute wholesale genocide, it is entirely naïve and disgustingly escapist to deny that so-called “acts of genocide” are not taking place at an increasingly alarming rate.  When a family of four is dragged from their car and shot in the street, simply on the basis of their religious persuasion, the action has transcended the bounds of mere murder.  When these actions take place over the course of months, increasingly systematic in the effort to weed out specific victims in the interest of political persuasion and intimidation, they no longer constitute low-intensity mob violence.  

For those who may be jumping to conclusions, I am not in any way accusing the US Army itself of genocidal activity, nor do I suggest that the United States government has in any way endorsed the violence in the interest of its own gain.  I am not even suggesting the existence of explicit complicity.

The necessitating conditions for these atrocities existed well before the US invasion, and were in large part fostered by the former regime.  There are disturbing parallels between Hussein’s empowerment of the Sunni minority at Shiite expense and the Belgian cooption of the Tutsi minority towards disenfranchising the Hutu majority in colonial Rwanda.  It is important never to put too much stock in historical parallelism (it more often than not results in a lack of original and innovative thought), but there is certainly merit in drawing from past experience.

What is clear is that the 2003 invasion certainly opened the floodgate, creating a socio-political vacuum that has been rapidly replaced with anarchy and instability (shame on me for mixing metaphors- is there such thing as a “vacuumgate”?).  It is also increasingly clear that the United States is no longer in control over the situation- this despite the much-heralded death of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, and this despite the optimistic rhetoric surrounding “Operation Together Forward,” the recently launched and supposedly comprehensive US/Iraqi effort to restore order and safety to the capital city.       

The 2003 invasion was a wrong in and of itself, a misplaced war predicated on an all-too-apparent combination of bad intelligence, outright deception, fear-mongering, and the good intentions (so I’m told to believe) of an intellectual/political clique convinced of its own moral transcendence.  The dawn of that transgression has passed, and now we are left with the consequences.  As disillusioned and angered as I am at the news of every new US combat casualty, I am also convinced that it is the moral imperative of this country not to leave until the proverbial “mission” is accomplished.

Genocide, as defined by the United Nations, was not a new phenomenon of the twentieth century.  What was new, however, was the ability of genocide to take place in the presence of an increasingly globalized international community well capable of preventing its occurrence.  For the first time, the post-WWII world put a name on the crime, creating a widely accepted normative consensus and institutions geared towards its eradication.  As evidenced by Cambodia, Rwanda, Srebrenica, and now Sudan, the world then donned its blinders, only willing to pull them off and acknowledge the mistake long after the bodies had been laid to rest. 

Not only the United States government, but also its consumer-oriented and comfortable insulated citizenry (the basis of that government), has shared in the collective Article 3 complicity of humanity writ large (please refer to the opening references).  Complicity by denial is still complicity all the same.  

Now at stake in Iraq is not a war on terror, a stand against tyranny, or a campaign against religious extremism.  At stake is the ability of us as Americans to look at ourselves in the mirror and honestly claim to be a “force for good” in the world.  Every innocent Iraqi man, woman, and child felled, even at the hands of fellow Iraqis, is a mark against that supposition.  If, somehow, we manage to salvage the situation and actually put an end to the genocidal violence, it is then our responsibility not to claim Iraq as a “victory” for America, or even democracy and self-determination.  Rather, it is beholden of us to admit our prior mistakes and failures, constructively evaluate and internalize the lessons learned, and from there on out act in a manner cognizant of past experience and the greater interest of humanity.    

Wishful thinking, I know.

  

 “Mankind must remember that peace is not God's gift to his creatures; peace is our gift to each other.”

-Elie Wiesel