It is a psychological cleansing. You don't have to use violence to cleanse, just the threat of violence.

Here is how it works. In order to avoid being cleansed, the sectarian groups went out of their houses and killed each other. The winners then inhabited the houses of the losers to "hide" from the friends of the losers who might try to cleanse them.

Kevin, do you hate America so much that you refuse to capitalize "The Surge"?

Much of Iraq remains intermingled but increasingly peaceful.

If you think that statement is meaningful, I suggest you have a look at this.

Short version: Baghdad is now an internally-walled city, still at war with itself. Large numbers of people are killed there on a daily basis.

OK, I'll bite. I made exactly that argument several months before the surge started. And in fact I'll still make it. Some significant percentage of the violence at that time had to do with claiming and seizing territory by various sectarian factions. Violence would go down once a piece was homogenized and walled off. Therefore the surge would have "worked" whether we had actually had the surge or not. The increase of fourteen foot high walls strike me as the most important thing that was ramped up during the surge. As long as ethnically cleansed neighborhoods were only separted by a street, violence would continue to flare. But when you have a 14 foot high wall, you can't look at your hated enemy day in and day out.

As for the article, the ethnic cleansing centered on Baghdad and surrounding areas. The fact that there are other places in Iraq that were not ethnically cleansed is a good thing, but not really part of the this discussion. I would like to know how many non-homogenized areas there are in Baghdad and by whom these areas are policed.

The same tactics and strategies endorsed for the successful occupation of Iraq could be used to pacify Stephen Biddle, Michael O'Hanlon, and Kenneth Pollack.

I would like to know how many non-homogenized areas there are in Baghdad and by whom these areas are policed.

Those are good questions. Obviously many are policed by neighborhood militias.

Here's a video of Baghdad that covers this issue.

Steven Simon's article in the May/June Issue of Foreign Affairs suggests that reducing the violence in Iraq has been a financial matter. The US is basically buying off the tribal leaders for $150 million. There's a novel concept -- pay bribes to thugs if they promise NOT to commit crime. I wonder if that policy would fly in the US. From the article:

"The deals were mediated by tribal leaders and consisted of payments of $360 per month per combatant in exchange for allegiance and cooperation. Initially referred to by the United States as "concerned local citizens," the former insurgents are now known as the Sons of Iraq. The total number across Iraq is estimated at over 90,000. Although the insurgents turned allies generally come well armed, at least one unit leader, Abu al-Abd, commander of the Islamic Army in Iraq, who controls Sunni neighborhoods in Baghdad, has said that he receives weapons as well as logistical support from U.S. units. His arrangement is probably typical. In November 2007, he agreed to a three-month pact, open to extension.

This strategy has combined with other developments -- especially the fact that so much ethnic cleansing has already occurred and that violence in civil wars tends to ebb and flow, as the contending sides work to consolidate gains and replenish losses -- to bring about the current drop in violence. The Sunni sheiks, meanwhile, are getting rich from the surge. The United States has budgeted $150 million to pay Sunni tribal groups this year, and the sheiks take as much as 20 percent of every payment to a former insurgent -- which means that commanding 200 fighters can be worth well over a hundred thousand dollars a year for a tribal chief. Although Washington hopes that Baghdad will eventually integrate most former insurgents into the Iraqi state security services, there are reasons to worry that the Sunni chiefs will not willingly give up what has become an extremely lucrative arrangement."

It's sad. Foreign Affairs has, like TNR and the Atlantic, become a largely meaningless rag.

Pollack should be barred from or had the decency to quit writing about the region years ago. Everything he's written has been wrong.

If you're going to list "the surge" as one of the causes of the reduction in violence, then how about also listing the firing of Donald Rumsfeld?

Last week Dylan Matthews and Ezra Klein posted a collection of comments from experts all over the political spectrum (including Biddle and O'Hanlon) answering the question "how important was the surge in lowering violence?"

http://prospect.org/cs/articles?article=how_important_was_the_surge

The loose consensus was that violence is down due to a synergistic combination of the Anbar Awakening, al-Sadr/Mahdi army cease-fire, change to COIN strategy, the surge and de facto sectarian cleansing of mixed neighborhoods in Baghdad. As Kevin suggests in this post, none named sectarian cleansing as "the chief cause."

Kenneth Pollack.

Kenneth Pollack - Kenneth Pollack ----- Kenneth Pollack.

Where have I heard that name before?