So much for the central government’s official monopoly on violence. The Kurds and Shi’ites both have their militias, and the Sunnis have a full-blown insurgency. They’ve got everything they need to run a civil war with.
In a three-way civil war, places like Baghdad and Kirkuk would turn into bloody messes, but there would be havens of relative safety in the north, south, and west.
But if the fighting takes place at the neighborhood level, it would be much worse than that.
I wish they’d disband the Sadr Militias. After they beat up students, freedom’s going to get very ugly in that part of town.
Why are they allowing militias to operate? I mean the Peshmerga have legitimate reasons, but the other militias are little more than religious police. They should be disbanned.
Expect to see refugees from the Shia and Sunni communities flood to secular Northern Iraq.
However on thinking, I see this as a stop gap measure to fill the holes in security, and since militias are always ideologically more motivated than a monolithic police force, maybe this is why they’ve been chosen to remain.
The three main parties I hate in Iraq are;
Supreme Council of Islamic Revolution In Iraq
The Sadr movement
Dawa party
What is also confusing is why doesn’t any of the populace have any backbone in confronting these thugs? Why don’t we arm them, support them or do something?
<Slight hijack>
Could we have let the Islamist parties come to power in order to discredit their policies and diminish their influence for the long term?
Perhaps because a significant part of the populace supports them, and the rest are all too aware that “confronting” them would lead to exactly the kind of neighborhood-level civil war the OP fears.
They can’t exactly allow the Kurds to keep their militia, while making the Shi’ites disband theirs. Especially when the Shi’ites, who’ve been out of power forever despite their majority status, are worried about being gamed out of a leading role yet again.
Not to mention, there’s still a Sunni insurgency that attacks Shi’ites, and the Shi’ites probably don’t have much faith in the security forces we’ve trained. They’re not going to unilaterally disarm against the Sunnis, either.
Won’t happen.
And I notice that the three main parties you hate in Iraq constitute a majority of the Shi’ites, who in turn are a majority of Iraqis. You may hate 'em, but the price of supporting democracy in places where you probably don’t like most of the players, is that you’re probably not going to like the winner, regardless of who it is.
I know, but my dissatisfaction with the main Islamist parties is because they have tenous links to Iran, and Abdul Aziz al-Hakim who allegedly promised 100 billion dollars to Iran in the form of the reparations. Anyway, lets just hope the people of Iraq will be able to vote people like him out of office in the years to come.
Anyone betting that a tenuous peace will eventually be cobbled together, which’ll hold for a generation or so, then erupt in full-blown Yugoslavian-style ethnic cleansing?
What do you expect? Iraq has a Shi’ite majority, but most Arab countries are Sunni-dominated. And (non-Arab) Iran is overwhelmingly Shi’ite. It goes without saying that they’re going to have links with Iran. Once again, to be bothered by this is to be bothered by Iraqi democracy.
Meaningless promise; Iraq’s a basket case that will be receiving aid, not giving it, for some time.
Well, JFTR, here’s the PM-Pres-VP slate:
Prime Minister: Ibrahim Jafari (Shi’ite)
President: Jalal Talabani (Kurd)
Veeps (2): Adel Abdul Mahdi (Shiite), Ghazi Yawar (Sunni, sort of)
I don’t know if Hakim has some lesser office in the new government. But if we’re giving them democracy, we have to accept their choices. If you weren’t ready to deal with that (even if it involved some holding of one’s nose), you shouldn’t have supported this invasion to begin with.
I would be impressed if any cobbled-together peace lasts six months, once our troop strength there is down under 20,000 or so. And that will happen eventually.
The PKU, one of the major kurdish parties that currently make up the kurdish umbrella party, also had major ties to Iran. Since I imagine that Iran has supported just about any anti-saddam faction in Iraq over the years and that the anti-saddam factions now make up the leaders of the Kurdish and Shia political parties, that you would be hard pressed to find a political party from these ethnic groups that didn’t have Iranian ties.
Also, there is a fairly strong arguement that Iraq, as the belligerant at the beginning of the Iran/Iraq war (and the user of illegal chemical weapons during that conflict) does in fact owe Iran reparations.
I didn’t, however, I do believe the first step to creating any decent central government which is representative, also has to respect the fact that only the government has a monopoly on violence, militias should be banned.
PUK
Both sides used Chemical weapons.
I don’t believe that will happen, if there was going to be any ethnic or religious civil war, I don’t think American troops would be able to stop fighting between them no matter how big their numbers were.
With an attitude like that, of course it would happen, its called a self fullfilling prophecy.
If a tradition of voting out the people who were voted in, then I expect we’d of succeeded.
Yugoslavian example is a bit tarnished for the fact that a communist dictatorship kept them together, and they broke up after the order broke down, however in Iraq, numerous Shiites and Sunnis see breaking the state apart as unnecessary and would undoubtedly make things worse.
I didn’t realize that. My apologies for having misrepresnted where you were coming from.
Our best shot to do that was in the immediate aftermath of the war. We didn’t have the will to do it then, when Iraq was still a much safer place than it is now. If it came to discussions now, the Kurds would probably ask, “If we disband the pershmerga, who’s going to keep the insurgents from attacking here, too?” And how do you argue with that?
We part ways there, then. I believe that if the U.S. had stuck to their original timetable (down to 30K troops by 9/03), Iraq would already be in the middle of a full-fledged civil war.
It’s harder for them to start such a conflict openly with us around, but if it started without us there in strength, we’d have a damned hard time coming back in and separating the warring parties.
Whoa! You grossly overestimate the power of my predictions to influence events. World leaders aren’t exactly hanging on my every word.
I’m afraid I don’t catch your meaning here.
OK, but the problem is, do they want the same thing? Sure, they both want Iraq to stay united, but suppose the question were: would you want Iraq to stay united, if the other guys were in charge? Think the numbers would still come out the same?
Well if Islamists can show they can respect the tradition of being the loyal opposition, then I expect it to be less volatile.
I don’t think it would be too much of a problem if any other guy was in charge, just as long as they respected the minorities rights, and let minorities have at least part of the obligation to run the government, hence the reason why theres a Kurd as president now.