# Posted 9:11 PM by Ariel David Adesnik  

SPECTACULARLY WRONG YET AGAIN: OxBlog, that is. Here's what I wrote three weeks before the invasion of Iraq:

LESSONS OF KOSOVO: Paul Wolfowitz seems to agree with OxBlog that ethnic violence will not present a serious threat to postwar Iraq, despite its devastating effects in Kosovo. As Wolfowitz told the NYT, Iraq's "ethnic groups have not had decades of slaughtering one another as happened in the Balkans. The problem in Iraq is a regime that slaughters everybody, it's equal opportunity repression,' he said." Sounds sorta like an evil version of the 14th amendment...

I'm not going to try to back out of that one or pretend I didn't say what I clearly said. I never thought that Sunnis would support an insurgency whose essential strategy is to slaughter as many innocent Shi'ites as possible in order to provoke a civil war. I never thought that Arab Muslims would behave in such a brutal manner toward other Arab Muslims. Slaughtering Jews in Israel or black Muslims in Darfur is one thing. But I never expected this kind of genocidal hatred across the Sunni-Shi'a divide.

There is also the question of misunderstanding Iraq as a one-man dictatorship as oppoosed to an ethnic dictatorship. As the post above indicates, I clearly saw Iraq as Saddam's regime, not a Sunni regime. I'm still not sure to what extent it was one or the other.

Clearly, one can argue that Sunnis support the insurgency because they were conditioned for decades to see politics in Iraq as ethnic warfare. But if memory serves, there were also tens of thousands of Sunni victims of the regime as well, so its ethnic identity far from self-evident.

By the way, I owe a significant debt to my brother M for finding the post cited above, all on his own initiative. He just wanted to know how well certain pundits anticipated what was to come in Iraq.

And before I go, one more error to cite. If you click on the words "ethnic violence" above, you will arrive at a post from February 23, 2003 in which I ask:

Will postwar Iraq descend into a maelstrom of ethnic, communal[,] religious violence? Looking for answers, I came across this article by Ted Gurr, a professor at the University of Maryland...

One trend that bodes well for postwar Iraq is that "The new democracies of Europe, Asia, and Latin America were especially likely to protect and promote minority rights."

Clearly, an aggressive push for democracy has not prevented the slaughter in Iraq. Why did I expect it would? Because I never expected the minority in Iraq to intentionally provoke a vicious civil war. In my post I cited the examples of Kosovo, Sudan and East Timor, where minorities were the principal victims of ethnic cleansing or civil war.

Even now, I don't understand how the Sunni minority expects to prevail. After a long interval of Shi'ite restraint, the death squads have emerged. If the Americans go, the Shi'ites will almost certainly prevail, thanks to both their militia and their American-trained army.

We have been familiar with suicide bombing for quite a while, but what we may be watching now is the first suicide of an entire ethnicity. (11) opinions -- Add your opinion