Cole and collective punishment

Juan Cole is one of the few bloggers who give a good name to the medium. "Informed Comment" indeed. It's a bold thing to name your blog, but Mr. Cole backs it up every time he sits at the keyboard.

It's been frustrating to me to watch him argue against a complete withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq, although with characteristic generosity he has often offered up posts from writers who argue just that.

Today, Cole seems to have turned. In this post, he's at least arguing for getting the ground troops out. (To me, it's unclear if he still makes the distinction between that and complete withdrawal.) His reasons, as always, are myriad and convincing.

I have not always paid as much attention to what's going on in Iraq as I should. I guess we can all say that. Recently, I've been trying retroactively to figure out what has happened since the second Bush invaded Iraq. It's not easy.

I've come to the conclusion that, at least for the past year or so, for whatever reason, U.S. military leaders seem to be using the playbook of the very dimmest and most contemptuous and vindictive colonial occupiers. In campaigns like Fallujah and now Tal Afar, U.S. and Iraqi forces are involved in hideous campaigns of collective punishment, a war crime under the 1949 Geneva Conventions. (Cole points out something I had missed the first time around, that the president himself ordered the horrific assault on Fallujah.)

This is a story that has not been covered in any way in the mainstream press. In Tal Afar, as in Fallujah, the media blackout is complete and, as Cole points out, draconian.

To repeat, Juan Cole says:

Let's get them out, now, before they destroy any more cities, create any more hundreds of thousands of internally displaced persons, provoke any more ethnic hatreds by installing Shiite police in Fallujah or Kurdish troops in Turkmen Tal Afar. They are sowing a vast whirlwind, a desert sandstorm of Martian proportions, which future generations of Americans and Iraqis will reap.

The ground troops must come out. Now. For the good of Iraq. For the good of America.

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