Iraq and Afghanistan

The exceptionally effective suicide bombings continue day after day, week after week. The targets are varied, but the emphasis seems to be on killings Shiites or Kurds, probably because the Americans are harder to get at. The insurgents have little concern that civilians are killed as well as their ostensible targets. Juan Cole feels that, in spite of all the claims by the Jihadists that they are responsible for the mayhem, the main source of the insurgency remains the Baathists and the Sunnis who lived well under Saddam. This seems right. They seem to have inexhaustible money and munitions. In fact, the operations are getting more sophisticated and deadly.

One can get a feel for what is happening by looking at a piece in the New York Times Magazine this last week. It is ostensibly a discussion of the development of small commando units to fight the insurgents. These are primarily made up of former Baathists and led by former officers in Saddam's forces. They are not ideological: they fight for the money and because warfare is all they know. They are being advised and to some degree organized by Americans, particularly by Americans who organized similar units to fight against the communists in Central America in the 1980s. The Americans are not too squeamish about how these forces fight, then or now.

My conclusion is that a distinct subculture of institutionalized violence developed in Iraq before we arrived on the scene. The people carrying this culture today are relatively few but extremely skilled and dedicated to their way of life. Most of them decided after the Americans dismissed them from the army and revoked their pensions to fight the Americans. They are still at it, although the preferred enemy is now the system the Americans established. A few representatives of this culture have decided that life is better on the other side, so are now organizing into units to fight the insurgency. My guess is that it will be a long time before another and competing culture of violence can successfully compete with this Baathist culture. The Shiites simply do not have the staying power; it is doubtful that the Kurds, even their Pesh-Murga, have it either. An outside power cannot create the starch and ruthlessness required for success overnight.

Democracy and "what the people want" are important, but they may not be the key considerations for Iraqis who have to live alongside and among the organized killers that dominate the insurgency. We hear of the people on "our side" that they kill. I have no doubt that they also kill many on "their side", for treason, informing, or just to terrorize them. If we can entice enough of these hard-boiled men to switch to our side, then our side will eventually win. But meanwhile we may well have created an organized and committed force that will end up, after we leave, setting aside the democratic institutions that we have so laboriously established. It is a dilemma for which I do not have a solution.