On the Cusp of Again

For people like me, for whom opposition to genocide was a key reason for our original support of the Iraq war, this is a bitter pill to swallow. Samantha Power argues bluntly in a LA Times editorial that we need to start crafting our future Iraq policy explicitly around preventing a genocide from erupting. Hopefully, she argues, we can leverage withdrawal to press the various Iraqi factions into an 11th hour agreement. However, we have to be prepared to evacuate vulnerable Iraqis into religiously homogenuous neighborhoods--and dramatically increase the amount of refugees we allow into our borders.

As I just wrote, Samantha Power is one of the sharpest thinkers out there, and on genocide especially is an indispensable resource. That doesn't make this editorial any less hard to read. But I does make it far more necessary.