I agree with much of what you say. The commendable desire on the part of the US to bring Sunnis inside the tent, and the somewhat restrained military response to the Sunni insurgency (in contrast to the decisive suppression of Al Qaeda in Iraq), was bound to lead to some sort of response like this. If the victims of the Shiite militias really are active insurgents and unreconstructed Baathists (and I share your assumption that they are), I don't really think we need to be too concerned.



But I take exception to the suggestion that democracy *must* evolve in this fashion. I'm not sure who you had in mind when you described similar death squads as having existed in Britain's past. Certainly our long history has had its violent episodes, but I would strenuously deny that such violence was a required step on the road to our democracy (I speak as a British Australian, but the same applies). And there is nothing anywhere in our history as dastardly as death squads!



Not our way at all. Quite the opposite, our democracy developed despite our Civil War not because of it, and without the need for widespread elimination of political foes. We assimilated them quite peacefully. The great British spirit of tolerance and forbearance is one of the hallmarks of our history from which which everyone can learn, Iraqis included, and was a legacy to your own culture for which you don't thank us often enough!

Kip:

Do we really know the full extent of the vigilanties in the US civil war.

I know the reporting from Iraq can be faulted but when you read/hear that a bus load of workers are kidnapped, torturedc and killed, how does this fit into they are just killing of the bad guys scenario.

PS:

Isn't Turner just looking for a way, as so many do, to legitimize these killers.

It has always been true that in order to establish the Law, one must first establish Order. Society must first experience the Iron Fist before it can be governed by the Velvet Glove.

In retrospect, the biggest mistake that we made in Iraq was in not completely disarming the Iraqi populace in 2003. We should have announced to everyone in the country that anyone other than Coalition forces and duly constituted Iraqi police/army seen on the streets with a weapon, ANY weapon, would be shot on sight. Then we should have started making examples of people who violated that prohibition, starting with Moqtada al-Sadr and other militia leaders.

The folks that "needed killing" needed it back in 2003, and our squeamishness has resulted in far higher casualties both to American forces and Iraqi civilians than otherwise would have been the case.

You can't make an omelet without breaking eggs. Our current dilemma shows the result of trying.

Do we really know the full extent of the vigilanties in the US civil war.

The full extent? No. But we have a pretty good idea. It's not pretty (and for some reason, the history books used in public schools tend to not go into much detail about this).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bleeding_Kansas

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pottawatomie_Massacre

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Black_Jack

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Osawatomie

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marais_des_Cygnes_massacre

...and that's just what happened in Kansas before the American Civil War got started in ernest.

You left out the biggest proxies of all:

The United Nations and its
Internation Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).

Ain't hindsight grand? Whoever made the decision to allow looters free rein should himself be shot in the legs as should have been said looters. Talk about a way to not instill confidence in a population from the get-go;let looters run amok and pretend they are only looting government offices of the bad saddam hussein regime. The Iraqi people at the time of the invasion sure the hell could not feel comfortable with US troops being their protectors now could they? Stealing is a big no-no in all societies and islam is perhaps even stricter about it. Does anyone think the rampant looting was limited to taking saddams furniture and computers and paintings?

Kip, I think you're confusing Turner's words with my own. I don't think democracy "must" evolve in this fashion. But I do think he's on to something.

At the same time, the real question is: where does it all end? Turner's key assumption is that the death squad members are killing those who need killing? But those victims have families, weapons and honor too. This is my larger point: if the state doesn't enforce order, do things become a race to the bottom and does a state of nature result, or is it really possible for a society to stabilize again with a state's intervention?

This will be very important to figure out. One of the proxies I neglected to mention are all of the private security firms in Iraq. What will keep them employed once the Iraq mission is over, whether that's next year or in five? Or will they become self-funding death squads that fight al Qaeda across the globe?

It looks like security is being privatized -- or maybe "proxyized" -- everywhere we turn.

It looks like security is being privatized -- or maybe "proxyized" -- everywhere we turn.

Not really- anti-security (aka 'terrorists', 'insurgents', etc) have been 'proxyized' for decades. It's just now that security forces have adopted the same innovation, possibly as a result of legal/liability issues related to what 'normal' forces can and cannot do. Bluntly put, there is no 'nice' way to put down an insurgency, and some people seem to think being nice should be a higher priority than winning the conflict.

I now fully agree with goesh and think Rummy was wrong to not order the suppression of looting. Even if some guilty Iraqi civilians were to be shot.

The failure to have a few basic plans & orders for the people, and Arabic speaking US Army folk to give such orders, was also a problem.

Turner's piece was great, but it fails to emphasize JUSTICE enough. Justice is actually a reactive concept when implemented in a system:
first there is some injustice (theft or bombing), then the justice system comes in and punished the thieves or bombers.

The death squads, protectors of Shia, are a response to the failures of Bremer and the current Iraqi gov't to punish Sunni terror bombers.
A failure to impose justice.

There has been far too many false negative errors in Iraqi justice, presuming the guilty "innocent" (because of lies from supporters?). The death squads will be making more of the other error, wrongly punishing some innocents in order to punish more guilty.

Sunni who give safe houses or food to terrorists, or lie about their knowledge of such killers, are not fully innocent. Treating them as totally innocent, when they are not, is also not justice.

Death squad justice is better than no justice.

You say: "Turner believes that death squads are a sort of primeval slime from which governments emerge."
But I read his claim as being that death squads are steps towards effective "law enforcement" -- filling a lack.

The KKK lynchers were enforcing segregation "laws", including unwritten ones, in the USA. The pro-Sharia terrorists are attempting to enforce their Sharia law with such methods. Before there is justice, there is an idea of "right and wrong", which has been violated. In Iraq there is a battle over which version of "right and wrong" is going to be enforced, and by whom.

Death squad justice is not so unlike US led Coalition justice against Saddam, being better than no justice (16 mostly ignored UN SC resolutions) -- and maybe even G. Clooney might agree, if it meant an end to genocide in Darfur.

Chester, when you say about death squads that they act "probably without a clear end in sight" you are VERY wrong.

The Taliban and Saddam era death squads, not unlike Pinochet or N. Viet (or any) communists, always had a clear goal. Total end of armed resistance.

When the Nazis destroyed a whole Czech town after a top Nazi was killed, the result was a huge reduction in resistance.

When Hezbollah murders anybody suspected of collaborating with Israel, the result is almost no contact.

The terrorists and guerrillas have a clear end in mind -- no more resistance. And they are willing to lower the threshold of punishable offense from "beyond reasonable doubt", less than "preponderance of evidence", down to "possible suspicion".

When suspicious activity is enough to incur the punishment of the guilty, conformity follows.

Turner's essay seems to identify the death-squad activity with the Sunnis/AQ/Baathist alliance. However, most reports I have read identify the Shia militias, or factions of them, of responsibility in the death squads. The fact that most of the victims are male Sunnis confirms this. The Shia are engaged in the age old tradition of vengance killings. Somebody from their tribe or clan was murdered by somebody from a Sunni tribe or clan. Now it's payback time. This process will continue until all the old debts are settled. In a sense, this isn't in opposition to civil society, it IS civil society, Iraqi style. The insight Turner makes is that this violence isn't a civil war in the conventional sense. It is vigilantism carrying out the extreme violence which the official gov't forces are reluctant to do, and in a sense, are not qualified to do, as they have no authority to settle tribal feuds.

They may provide a baptism for the state, but confirmation of the state will only be secure when the state in turn disposes these killers through legitimate means.

(Right, I was commenting on the quote - sorry)

Killing terrorists is one thing. Revenge is another. With national reconstruction - as in Germany, Japan, Chile, South Africa, ex-Soviet Bloc - the only way to move forward is to hold ones' noses and let some guilty men go free.

Execute the ringleaders, certainly, but a national vendetta against every one involved in the old regime just isn't practical.

Hopefully the Muslim ethic will triumph...

Tom Grey -- you say, "I read his claim as being that death squads are steps towards effective "law enforcement" -- filling a lack."

I think that is what he means too. He says this in another part: If civil society finds itself threatened by utter chaos, it may resort to free-enterprise war against its enemy. By definition what it does then cannot be law-abiding or approved by its own government; it is in Hobbes' state of nature; but it can be a kind of savage rationality that might precede law.

But that's my concern: I believe it's just as possible that the savage rationality which precedes law might be a savage rationality which succeeds it.

Classic Communist or national liberation insurgencies were all meant to precede the law of a new regime -- a state transformed. But many, many of them failed, or they instead preceded chaos. I think it's hard to tell which is which -- the only choice might be to choose sides and make an outcome rather than guessing as to what it might be without one's own participation.

As to your second critique, "Chester, when you say about death squads that they act "probably without a clear end in sight" you are VERY wrong."

This is a misunderstanding, and as usual, can be attributed to my poor writing. I don't mean that they don't have an "endstate" in sight -- they do, as you point out. I mean instead that it's possible that the endstate will never come, and there might be no end to the violence.

rosignol,

This is the problem isn't it? States are no longer effective guarantors of security, and for the reason that you've nailed: "some people seem to think being nice should be a higher priority than winning the conflict."

It seems that one of the problems with the US in Iraq is a lack of anything other than extremes when it comes to firepower. We can either level a city or play nice. But the middle ground between these two is exceedingly difficult -- probably because it requires a level of cultural knowledge that we don't possess. We're making progress, though -- of this I'm positive.

To me, this is one of the strongest arguments for continuing the fight there: Iraq is a countrywide 24/7 counterinsurgency laboratory which forces the military to learn about irregular warfare. Our future conflicts will make this one look exceptionally mild. Best to stay and learn how to do it now while we can.

That might be harsh, but I believe it.

Readers may be interested to see the latest post, "Does Max Boot read blogs?" which discusses the proxy-warfare angle from the opposite end of the spectrum.

Kip Watson said this: "The great British spirit of tolerance and forbearance is one of the hallmarks of our history from which which everyone can learn,..."

Does anyone besides me see anything ironic about this statement?

If not, please study past British history and look at the present behaviour of the Brits in their hatred of the Jews and the United States.

Papa Ray
West Texas
USA

In some ways you are right...
Here in the Philippines, there has been an increase in right wing political killings which gets publicity,but ignores the killing by the NPA of local politicians and businessmen.
The problem with this "underground" is that too Americans forget that people with families prefer authoritarian governments to anarchy.
That is why Iranian support of a shiite militia is so dangerous: a dictatorship is one thing, a theocracy is another.

I just wrote a post about Turner's post, here.

You might want to read that essay a little bit more critically, as it seems to talk uncritically about death squads that "...kill some local dissident."

I think he might be a little unclear on how this democracy thing is supposed to work. At the very least, he's overromanticising death squads (see my post for more).

There's an important difference, by the way, between death squads and our army: our army enforces civil rule, and death squads just get violent. That's one reason, BTW, that we had to be careful about using troops from nondemocracies to patrol Iraq. They have less of an idea of the civil society.