This is a short diary, for which you can falme if you like.
But it's an important piece of concrete evidence in the very pertinent debate over the putative success of The Surge, aka McSame/Quaylin's one halfway effective bleating point in the national conversation over Iraq.
Was it the introduction of extra troops that pacified Iraq's multi-ethnic cities? Or did the violence simply stop because its purpose--ethnic cleansing--had already been achieved?
Today, geography professor John Agnew of UCLA has an answer for us.
Satellite images taken at night show heavily Sunni Arab neighborhoods of Baghdad began emptying before a U.S. troop surge in 2007, graphic evidence of ethnic cleansing that preceded a drop in violence,
[...]
"By the launch of the surge, many of the targets of conflict had either been killed or fled the country, and they turned off the lights when they left," geography professor John Agnew of the University of California Los Angeles, who led the study, said in a statement.
"Essentially, our interpretation is that violence has declined in Baghdad because of intercommunal violence that reached a climax as the surge was beginning," said Agnew, who studies ethnic conflict.
The fallback argument is that the troops must have been "one of many factors" that helped. This is something you hear many Democrats saying, including Obama. Yet while none of those men & women in uniform went to Iraq with the intention of making the situation worse, that may be the end result:
"Our findings suggest that the surge has had no observable effect, except insofar as it has helped to provide a seal of approval for a process of ethno-sectarian neighborhood homogenization that is now largely achieved," Agnew's team wrote in their report.
We arrived just in time to consolidate the tragic results of villainy.
Finally, the study makes clear that the Pentagon still has a few more cameras to ban:
Agnew's team used publicly available infrared night imagery from a weather satellite operated by the U.S. Air Force.