This won’t just affect Mosul, or Nineveh, or Iraq

January 3, 2019 2:43 PM

Iraq’s Post-ISIS Campaign of Revenge The corruption and cruelty of the state’s response to suspected jihadis and their families seem likely to lead to the resurgence of the terror group. By Ben Taub (CW: violence, rape, mutilation)
posted by roolya_boolya (10 comments total)

This article was incredibly disturbing to read. It really shakes me how little the destruction of Iraqi society is discussed or even mentioned in the US. Not that it's surprising, really, but it's almost eerie when you notice that the Biblical devastation visited upon Iraq by the Bush II administration is just a non-entity at this point. For many people (too many in the political elite), it's just background noise. From promises of democracy to five-minute show trials and mass executions...

The gross footnote to that is of course the ongoing rehabilitation of everyone who advocated for the war or lent it tacit support, from GWB and Bill Kristol to Democrats like Joe Biden.
posted by miltthetank at 3:21 PM on January 3, 2019 [22 favorites]

Yes. Let us not forget what created the vacuum that daesh filled and why.
posted by dazed_one at 3:55 PM on January 3, 2019 [6 favorites]

Thomas Veale, a U.S. Army colonel and a spokesman for the coalition, told the A.P. that it was “irresponsible” to draw attention to civilian casualties in West Mosul. If not for the coalition’s campaign, he said, Iraqis would have suffered years of “needless death and mutilation” at the hands of “terrorists who lack any ethical or moral standards.”

Phew, just as well the inhabitants of West Mosul suffered needless death and mutilation at the hands of ethical professionals such as Mr. Veale, then. I mean, it would have been just terrible to have been killed by the wrong kind of people. I hope that their surviving relatives, if any, can take comfort from knowing that their families were killed by the good guys.
posted by scruss at 4:21 PM on January 3, 2019 [21 favorites]

This was an amazing, powerfully upsetting read.

For many terrorism convicts, a stop before the gallows is a spot on Iraqi state television, as participants in a reality show called “In the Grip of the Law.”

I...just...uh...

What in the hell? I think I understand how the US got to Iraq. I sure as hell understand how the US did nothing but destabilize an already awful situation and blew it up into something much worse. What I don’t understand is what the fuck the US military is still doing there. I mean, yeah, there’s a moral obligation to try and undo the fuckery they created, and more cynically, there’s oil and strategic importance, but does any thinking person really believe that this won’t just continue to spiral worse and worse and literally anything the US might do will just contribute?
posted by Slarty Bartfast at 7:52 PM on January 3, 2019

By the way, that is some truly heroic journalism.
posted by Slarty Bartfast at 7:59 PM on January 3, 2019 [3 favorites]

What I don’t understand is what the fuck the US military is still doing there.

Formerly, I'd have said that the military's presence provided an excuse for contractors to bill the US government. But now, I suspect the answer is “Keeping a place warm for Russia.”
posted by Joe in Australia at 11:38 PM on January 3, 2019 [1 favorite]

If ever there was an article that did not need cutesy New Yorker cartoons in sidebars.

This post should definitely stay up, and I'm glad I read it because these things must be known, but it needs some serious content warnings. I think I will be making liberal use of sedatives to get to sleep and I don't even have any relevant personal experiences to be triggered.
posted by XMLicious at 2:10 AM on January 4, 2019

This whole article describes a Hellscape which reads like the nastiest, most horrific Last Days predictions of all three Abrahamic religions with compounding daily interest. For certain the seeds of more terror have been planted.
posted by Katjusa Roquette at 5:57 AM on January 4, 2019 [1 favorite]

"The gross footnote to that is of course the ongoing rehabilitation of everyone who advocated for the war or lent it tacit support, from GWB and Bill Kristol to Democrats like Joe Biden."

I try to use GWB as a sanity-check on how awful Trump is. What's Trumps body count, I ask myself? Okay, he may be a bigger asshole than GWB, but he's responsible for a whole lot less death.
posted by el io at 11:00 AM on January 4, 2019 [5 favorites]

Mod note: Added a content warning.
posted by restless_nomad (staff) at 2:11 PM on January 4, 2019