Consider Yourself Lucky

by digby

I would expect that once the election is over, the right is going to force our attention back to the quagmire by saying that the Democrats walked back a clear victory in Iraq. It will be important to remember that there was never any real success in Iraq, only temporary lessening of violence designed to get the Republicans through the election. It is barely holding right now:

Haj Ali’s family had been home for less than a month when a makeshift bomb blew off part of his garage. The message was clear: Go back to wherever you came from. Two years ago, when Sunni Muslims began killing Shiites in Ali’s west Baghdad neighborhood, he quickly gathered a few belongings and fled. Last month, his family returned home. They didn’t stay long.”We thought it was safe,” Ali said. “Now I see that for us, home means death. There are still people who don’t want us there.” Only a small fraction of the roughly 5 million Iraqis who’ve fled their neighborhoods in fear since the 2003 U.S.-led invasion have gone back, although returns have picked up since the Iraqi government last month began urging people home.In Baghdad, where most of the sectarian cleansing has taken place, about 8 percent of the people who moved within the country have gone back to their neighborhoods, according to the International Organization for Migration.Many Iraqi families have returned to their old homes in peace, but a disturbing trend already is emerging: They’re being targeted and attacked, and in some cases killed, for trying to go home. Some have been threatened. Others have found explosives tied to their front doors. Some have had their homes blown up.

It’s been a while since I’ve done the tiresome exercise of “what if it happened here” but reading this today, it struck me that while Americans are very reasonably anxious at the fact the economy is turbulent and unstable — what must it be like to be an Iraqi? They were already living in a politically repressive society, but one which allowed a kind of normal life if one didn’t interact negatively with authorities. It was bad. But for the last five years, they have been living in hell. Bombs, hunger, ethnic cleansing, death, injury, total chaos. Their futures are grim, their hopes for their children are necessarily miniscule, they are homeless and without even the most basic social services. Their country is still a war zone after all this time.

The same people who brought that carnage to the Iraqis, brought this recession to us, with its inevitable belt tightening and job losses and general sense of unease. Considering what they did over there, we should be grateful they didn’t pull out all the stops and “liberate” us too.

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