Do Insurgents Count?
By Interesting post from John Quiggan, pointing out that, if successful against Sadr, we’ll be wiping out in a week or so as many people as Hussein killed in a typical year.
I’m of two minds on the question of Sadr and his army. It’s obvious that we’re using a bizarre moral metric to justify the slaughter of his men; that the Pentagon has heavily publicized the “300 dead” all weekend indicates that we’re beginning to find ourselves in the “body count” portion of the program. Moreover, the people we’re killing are neither foreign fighters nor supporters of Saddam Hussein. Indeed, Sadr and his people had every reason to oppose the Hussein regime. So, the people we’re killing in Najaf are the people who are supposedly justifying the invasion.
On the other hand, it’s hard to believe that Sadr has anything on his (perhaps somewhat unbalanced) mind other than religious dictatorship. The existence of his private army will destabilize any attempt to make Iraq democratic, or even, I suspect, stable. The U.S. should have tried to finish him off in April and May; no one believes the cover story that this offensive is all at the behest of the Allawi government.
These are the kinds of decisions and actions that we shouldn’t have to make, and that we wouldn’t have to make if we had a competent administration.