The Adventures of Chester: The Autumn of the Patriarch

Frederick Turner has written a brilliant piece in TCSDaily that offers a reinterpretation of the "death squads" so frequently mentioned in the press coverage of Iraq:

When there is a significant fraction of the population that will not join in political compromise, whether because of ideological idealism, addiction to supernatural power, or the passion for revenge, civil society is faced with a diabolical paradox.

It wishes to form legal and political institutions that are transparent, correctable by debate, and under the control of the people (with protections for minorities), where people can make good money in the marketplace and raise families in peace. But the reality is that even after all possible compromises have been offered to the refuseniks, civil society is faced with a small but absolutely hostile minority that will be content with nothing but total victory.

How to deal with this minority?

There are, from the point of view of Iraq's nascent civil society, some thousands of people who, in the Texas phrase, need killing. Who is going to do it?

In the absence of government intervention, the answer is: ordinary people. Basically the killers are posses of self-organized vigilantes, who know their local area, who know who the bombers are, and who the bombers' relatives are. The posses are expert in distinguishing those people who might be fair political enemies from those who will go on striking, like a snake, even when cut in two.

This type of violence is not unique to Iraq:

In living memory almost every decent and legal regime in Latin America was preceded by a chaotic period in which ordinary men armed themselves with guns, said goodnight to their families, and went out in groups to kill some local dissident. That period was a bit further back in the past for the French, the English, and the Americans. But no nation can be shown to have reached the rule of democratic law without it.

And today in the news, it seems there is a dispute between the Iraqi government and the US as to how to handle these death squads. It's almost as if the US and Iraqi governments read Turner's article as a script:

U.S. and Iraqi forces raided the stronghold of a Shiite militia led by a radical anti-American cleric in search of a death squad leader in an operation disavowed by Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki.

Al-Maliki, who relies on political support from the cleric Muqtada al- Sadr, said the strike against a figure in al-Sadr's Mahdi militia in Sadr City "will not be repeated."

[ . . . ]

Tank cannons boomed out over the city five times in rapid succession Wednesday, and U.S. F-16 jet fighters screamed low overhead as the conflict in Sadr City continued into the day.

Four people were killed and 18 wounded in overnight fighting in the overwhelmingly Shiite eastern district, said Col. Khazim Abbas, a local police commander, and Qassim al-Suwaidi, director of the area's Imam Ali Hospital.

Iraqi army special forces, backed by U.S. advisers, carried out a raid to capture a "top illegal armed group commander directing widespread death squad activity throughout eastern Baghdad," the military said.

Al-Maliki, who is commander in chief of Iraq's army, heatedly denied he knew anything about the raid.

"We will ask for clarification about what has happened in Sadr City. We will review this issue with the multinational forces so that it will not be repeated," he said.

Commentary

Perhaps our current decade will one day be known as "The Age of Proxies" since those organizations seem to define it. Wherever one looks, proxies, clients, and stand-ins are prevalent: Hezbollah; the Mahdi militias; the entire state of Syria; the Taliban and Pakistan's ISI; and of course, Iraq's death squads. Turner believes the members of death squads "want to survive and have something to lose—they envisage a future in which they can stop killing and get on with family life, while the horrible nightmares gradually fade."

This is a different mindset altogether than that of the guerrilla -- but that might not matter. Omar Cabezas described the lifestyle well in his memoir Fire From the Mountain: The Making of A Sandinista.

So I had to go underground. What this means is you are now operating outside the law, totally hidden from the Guard, from informers, from neutral bystanders, from your friends, and from your family. You go around under cover, you live in safe houses, you carry a weapon, and have responsibilities of a whole other kind.

Yet while the mindset might be different, the result is the same -- the lifestyle that Cabezas describes, probably without a clear end in sight.

Turner believes that death squads are a sort of primeval slime from which governments emerge. But might they not also be the maggots that feast on their corpses? Perhaps the true victim of such squads and other proxies is the state itself, so long the leviathan that its demise is now both impossible to imagine and futile to escape.

UPDATE: Welcome Instapundit readers! Why not pull up a chair and stay awhile? Here, have a cold glass of lemonade.

Seriously, if you are a foreign policy or warfare junkie, this blog might be for you. Scroll through the main page and see if there's anything else that interests you. I recently started podcasting, and Daveed Gartenstein-Ross, former radical Muslim and now a terrorism consultant, was my latest guest.

Well, thought I'd be hospitable. In any case, hope you'll stop by again sometime.

Posted by Chester on October 25, 2006 11:09 PM to The Adventures of Chester