Just another day in the life and death of Iraq XXXI

By Michael J.W. Stickings

Today, as reported by the Post, it was Mustansiriya University:

The coordinated detonation of two bombs during the after-school rush at a Baghdad university killed at least 60 people Tuesday and wounded more than 140 in what university officials described as one of the deadliest attacks on academia since the 2003 U.S.-led invasion.

Reuters currently has the death toll at 70, "many of them young women students". "In all, at least 105 were killed in bombings and a shooting in the capital" today.

The BBC also has it at 70, with 170 wounded. "Pictures from the campus showed a scene of devastation, with wrecked and blackened vehicles scattered across a wide area."

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It isn't enough for Prime Minister Maliki to say that "a hopeless group of Saddamists and extremists" is to blame. To imply that the Sunni insurgency is "hopeless" is only to belittle it, to misrepresent it, perhaps even to misunderstand it. This from a Shiite puppet with ties to Sadr. It may be true that Sunni insurgents perpetrated these horrendous acts today, but what is to blame overall is not one side of the sectarian divide or another, for such blame only deepens the divide, but the sectarianism itself, the culture of violence that has been unleashed as a result of America's botched war and occupation and that cannot be controlled by a government that lacks both legitimacy and authority.

Perhaps Iraq is beyond repair. If so, the violence will continue and perhaps worsen. (And I suspect it will.) But it would help if the Iraqi government weren't itself a sectarian offshoot and if there were greater understanding on all sides of the nature of the sectarianism that, unleashed, results in the mass murder of innocent students at a university.

There is more than enough blame to go around.