The places that are experiencing quiet were probably quiet before. It's not as if Iraq was rocked with violence, you know- before we got there, that is. Saddam wasn't killing all that many people. He massacred Kurds who were in active revolt, and he massacred some Shiites doing the same. Aside from those instances, he wasn't killing all the many people. Now we are massacring Sunnis in active revolt, and the Shiites and the Sunnis are killing each other (and we can do little to stop them), and the separatist Kurds are heating up the Turkish border.
When the CIA starts telling you that you are creating more terrorists in a place, and the military starts to make noises about losing the war, you can make all the noises you want to about those "quiet areas", but I think the only people who will believe they are significant are people who don't read the papers, or who already bought Bush's program, and don't care about facts. The fact is Iraq is in civil war now. We created the opportunity for it, and thus it is directly attributable to our actions, and is our fault. Iraqis are worse off now than they were before the war, in terms of life expectancy and quality of life, and Iraqis know that. |
