With the largest U.S. presence in Iraq of the entire war, Baghdad is still being ethnically cleansed, and at least 1000 Iraqis (a very conservative estimate) are dying every month. Petraeus and Crocker didn’t get any questions about Iraq in this context. Instead, senators have asked about a prospective humanitarian catastrophe in the wake of a U.S. withdrawal.
There’s no doubt that’s a legitimate question, since any withdrawal scenario has to contemplate disaster, not just for U.S. forces but for Iraqis. Here Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) asks Crocker if post-occupation Iraq will be worse than the genocide in Darfur. Crocker doesn’t quite endorse the statement, but says “the prospects for a truly catastrophic humanitarian disaster could be considerable.” And indeed, it could be, and the country needs to debate that. Yet part of that debate should be the fact that sectarian cleansing is happening in Iraq right now, despite the best efforts of the largest U.S. force in Iraq since the invasion.
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