Think Progress reports on the latest neo-con attempt to defend American violence in Iraq:
AEI’s Fred Kagan, the architect of the Iraq surge, has a history of grossly misreading events on the ground in Iraq. In August 2007, amidst the height of skyrocketing violence in Iraq, Kagan claimed that “sectarian deaths” were “way down.” After Baghdad had been virtually cleansed of Sunnis in March 2008, Kagan decried the “magnificent myth” of ethnic cleansing in Iraq.
At an AEI panel Wednesday, Kagan drastically overplayed Iraqis’ tolerance for “collateral damage” resulting from U.S. military incursions. Comparing Afghanistan and Iraq, Kagan said that a notable difference between the two wars is that Iraqi civilians “were not bitching” when civilians were killed:
KAGAN: The interesting thing is that when we were fighting those battles and doing that damage, on the whole the Iraqis were not bitching about collateral damage.