Max Weber defined government as needing a monopoly on the use of force. When viewed from this perspective, you can see what a disaster Iraq has become. Through history, governments are largely a farce unless they control the armed forces. These militias have to be disarmed and disbanded, the Washington Post in their editorial is exactly right in their Editorial, A Slipping Last Chance:
How to rescue the situation? Mr. Maliki and Mr. Bush are likely to discuss a reinforcement of U.S. and Iraqi troops in Baghdad, which might help. Those forces will have to be more aggressive in confronting Shiite as well as Sunni forces -- especially the Iranian-backed Mahdi Army of Moqtada al-Sadr, which, like Hezbollah in Lebanon, seeks to create a state within a state to fight its own wars.
Currently Iraq is suffering roughly 3,000 civilian casualties a month, thats like having one World Trade Center every single month in a country with less than 10% the population of the United States. It would be as if we lost 30,000 dead every month on a per capita basis.
These militias have a long history. In the aftermath of our own civil war, the Ku Klux Klan, Red Shirts and the like wrought a terrible vengeance on their political enemies and made a mockery of our democratic process, not to mention the 14th and 15th amendments. The Freedmen were eventually left to serve a century of what amounted to peonage. In post World War I Germany the Freikorps served the same purpose, providing a platform of chaos that the Nazi party would eventually ride to completely dominate Germany. Hezbollah too creates the chaos that provides a tilt towards extremism. The current Lebanese government is unable to control this militia, and has been thrust unwillingly into the fray. Sometimes governments use these militias as a fig leaf of deniability as with the shanghaied in Darfur.
Given all these examples you have to wonder that the Bush Administration has so frequently looked the other way, not disarming the Mehdi militia in Iraq, allowing the warlords to hold corrupt sway in the south of Afghanistan, and actually funding warlords in Somalia. At some point we need to come grips with the fact that as difficult as disarming is, the alternative is far worse.
1 comment:
The US policy of funding the warlords was completely logical because the US thought that the warlords were the only "viable political actors." The so-called Transitional Federal Government has never been a viable political actor.
Have you noticed how peaceful Somalia has become now that the "viable political actors" have been driven out?
Stephen Marsh
somalianarchy.com
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