Geographers wade into the politics of war armed with those damned facts again.......
The conventional story is that The Surge solved the violence in Iraq in the two main places it was occurring: Anbar province in the west, and the sectarian violence in Baghdad itself. Well, it's been shown that the decrease in violence in Anbar was due to tactics initiated before the surge, namely paying off the local tribal leaders and arming them to fight Al-Quaeda in Iraq, the Anbar Awakening Council. <http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/ 2007_08/011937.php> Weeeellllll...it looks like the reason that The Surge worked in Baghdad was.... ...wait for it ...the Shiite militias ran out of Sunnis to kill or drive away. This would account for why Al-Sadr was so willing to have his militia stand down...they'd won. <http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/09/080919074830.htm> "Night light in neighborhoods populated primarily by embattled Sunni residents declined dramatically just before the February 2007 surge and never returned, suggesting that ethnic cleansing by rival Shiites may have been largely responsible for the decrease in violence for which the U.S. military has claimed credit, the team reports in a new study based on publicly available satellite imagery. 'Essentially, our interpretation is that violence has declined in Baghdad because of intercommunal violence that reached a climax as the surge was beginning,' said lead author John Agnew, a UCLA professor of geography and authority on ethnic conflict. 'By the launch of the surge, many of the targets of conflict had either been killed or fled the country, and they turned off the lights when they left.'" <http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/09/080919074830.htm> Paper cited is: Agnew et al. Baghdad nights: evaluating the US military ‘surge’ using nighttime light signatures. Environment and Planning A, 2008; 40 (10): 2285 DOI: 10.1068/a41200 <http://www.envplan.com/abstract.cgi?id=a41200> The abstract and full article pdf is there. I don't know if I can get this because it's publicly available, or if it's because I'm getting it through a University IP address (which is the case for a lot of journals). I have the full PDF, so if you can't get it and want it, let me know... -- Bruce Johnson "No matter where you go, there you are", B. Banzai --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "StrataList-OT" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/StrataList-OT?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
