Sadly, The Surge is Working

Violence against Iraqis is down. "I think the 'surge' is working," say John Murtha. But how is it working? Any analysis of the surge’s success or failure must account for the fact that the decline in violence has been accompanied by a dramatic rise in the number of Iraqis forced to leave their homes. “UNHCR estimates that more than 4.4 million Iraqis have left their homes. Of these, some 2.2 million Iraqis are displaced internally, while more than 2.2 million have fled to neighbouring states, particularly Syria and Jordan.”

The reduction in violence attributed to the surge over the months of August-November coincides with a sharp spike in the number of displaced Iraqis according to the Geneva-based International Organisation for Migration: “Overall August 2007 showed a sharp rise - of over 70 percent compared to July - in the numbers of Iraqis forced to abandon their homes.”

While keeping rival militias at arms length, the surge has done nothing to curtail block by block, neighborhood by neighborhood ethic cleansing. 60,000 Iraqis a month are forced from their homes. The consequence of this massive ethnic cleansing is the “success” of the surge: If over 4 million potential victims of violence move or are forced from where they are threatened, violence must go down.

In Baghdad, a city of 4 million, 1.4 million residents have moved or been driven from their old neighborhoods to more homogeneous ones. More than a quarter of the population relocated: "If you look at Baghdad, it is essentially a very cleansed city. It is, the Shia and Sunni communities have been separated by the river. You look increasingly around the areas that were once intermixed. They're no longer mixed."

By facilitating what Fareed Zakaria called "the largest ethnic cleansing in the world since the Balkans," the surge has reduced violence overall. But because it has done so via the death or displacement of millions of Iraqis it's right to say the the 'success' is unconscionable.