Iraqi End State?
Basra, Iraq’s second largest city has been under complete Iraqi control for the last few months after the British Army left. If ever there were a city that ought to be calm, it is Basra–a completely Shiite region with a vibrant port economy. It represents the idealized end state for our efforts in Iraq, but as the New York Times reports this morning, it is a grim vision of the future, dominated by religious gangs and militias.
One especially disturbing trend is the slaying of at least 100 women in the last year, according to the police. The Iraqi authorities have blamed Shiite militiamen for many of those killing, saying the militants had probably deemed the women to be impious.
“Most of the killings are done by gunmen in police cars,” said Sheik Khadem al-Ribat, a Basra tribal leader who claims no party membership.
As I have said before, we are arming many militias in the hopes that security can be brought to the country. But it isn’t working out the way we planned. Even in a city like Basra where the wars between Sunni and Shiite do not exist, the gangster mentality rules.
Jaleel Khalaf, a police general, believes that his own men are trying to kill him. The general, who has a penchant for berets and camouflage scarves, leaned back on one of his overstuffed office couches and nonchalantly recounted the 10 assassination attempts he had survived since he started his job in July. He blames militia-affiliated policemen for some of those attempts, most of which were bomb attacks.
In 1994 Robert Kaplan published an article called The Coming Anarchy
Once the legal monopoly of armed force, long claimed by the state, is wrestled out of its hands, existing distinctions between war and crime will break down.
We have been discussing on these pages the tragic consequences of neoconservative idealists like George Bush and John McCain trying to “create their own reality” in Iraq. Some of my correspondents have said that we will “get out of Iraq by winning.” If this is what winning looks like, God help the Iraqis.
[...] soonerblue wrote an interesting post today onHere’s a quick excerpt Basra, Iraq’s second largest city has been under complete Iraqi control for the last few months after the British Army left. If ever there were a city that ought to be calm, it is Basra–a completely Shiite region with a vibrant port economy. It represents the idealized end state for our efforts in Iraq, but as the New York Times reports this morning, it is a grim vision of the future, dominated by religious gangs and militias. One especially disturbing trend is the slaying of at least 100 women in the last year, according to the police. The Iraqi authorities have blamed Shiite militiamen for many of those killing, saying the militants had probably deemed the women to be impious. “Most of the killings are done by gunmen in police cars,” said Sheik Khadem al-Ribat, a Basra tribal leader who claims no party membership. [...]
[...] Neptunus Lex wrote an interesting post today on Iraqi End State?Here’s a quick excerptIt represents the idealized end state for our efforts in Iraq, but as the New York Times reports this morning, it is a grim vision of the… [...]
The Coming Anarchy from The Atlantic.
see link above:
“You see,” my friend the Minister told me, “in the villages of Africa it is perfectly natural to feed at any table and lodge in any hut. But in the cities this communal existence no longer holds. You must pay for lodging and be invited for food. When young men find out that their relations cannot put them up, they become lost. They join other migrants and slip gradually into the criminal process.”
“In the poor quarters of Arab North Africa,” he continued, “there is much less crime, because Islam provides a social anchor: of education and indoctrination. Here in West Africa we have a lot of superficial Islam and superficial Christianity. Western religion is undermined by animist beliefs not suitable to a moral society, because they are based on irrational spirit power. Here spirits are used to wreak vengeance by one person against another, or one group against another.” Many of the atrocities in the Liberian civil war have been tied to belief in juju spirits, and the BBC has reported, in its magazine Focus on Africa, that in the civil fighting in adjacent Sierra Leone, rebels were said to have “a young woman with them who would go to the front naked, always walking backwards and looking in a mirror to see where she was going. This made her invisible, so that she could cross to the army’s positions and there bury charms . . . to improve the rebels’ chances of success.”
Finally my friend the Minister mentioned polygamy. Designed for a pastoral way of life, polygamy continues to thrive in sub-Saharan Africa even though it is increasingly uncommon in Arab North Africa. Most youths I met on the road in West Africa told me that they were from “extended” families, with a mother in one place and a father in another. Translated to an urban environment, loose family structures are largely responsible for the world’s highest birth rates and the explosion of the HIV virus on the continent. Like the communalism and animism, they provide a weak shield against the corrosive social effects of life in cities. In those cities African culture is being redefined while desertification and deforestation—also tied to overpopulation—drive more and more African peasants out of the countryside.”
Now with that said, TELL ME, we are not supposed to militarize and protect the free flow of oil.
February 1994
Morgan W:
We’ve been militarizing and protecting the free flow of oil for decades. Overthrowing Saddam by invasion and occupation was simply an amateurish move in that ongoing process. Rather like kicking over a chess board because you find the game frustrating. Turns out, that doesn’t actually win you the game.
We’ve spent many hundreds of billions on oil profits for Arab sheiks who support Wahhabism, hundreds more on weapons to be ready to intervene in the middle east, and now many hundreds more on an invasion and occupation.
At what point do we consider investing some of those many hundreds of billions in alternative energy R&D?
“At what point do we consider investing some of those many hundreds of billions in alternative energy R&D?”
Hopefully right away. What I argue for here:
http://outofoil.wordpress.com/
1. Any farm that sells its food no further than 100 miles from the farm, pays no taxes.
2. Private equity investments in alternative energy start-ups, are 100% tax deductible.
3. The US will categorically maintain military and economic control of Iraq. US-Middle East policy will clearly articulate that our access to oil will not be chanced against the attitudes of their most extreme religious leaders.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nvPvtF8idiA&rel=1]
And what about our own most extreme religious leaders? They seem to have wrested control of our country…
“Alternative energy” should get the same kind of government subsidies that have been handed over to the “traditional energy” mavens of oil, coal, timber, and nuclear biz. If you looked deep into the subsidies and corporate welfare and favors those energy “sources” have received over the past 150 years and extended that into the next 150 years for clean alternative sources, we could tell the Whahabbis and the like to fuck off. That the oil barons of the Middle East are not funding the R&D for the next generations of power production shows just how mentally crippled they are. Ditto for Exxon, BP, Texaco, etc. At best they’re denying their own great-grand children a decent future by ignoring “peak oil” years. At worst…well, let’s not go there. If they believe in Hell, they’ll see it sooner than many of the rest of us will.
[...] Six weeks ago, I wrote that Basra would become a real problem for the Iraqi government. In this morning’s New York Times, the seat of the pants operating style of Prime Minister Maliki was revealed to be at the heart of the disaster last week in Iraq’s southern city. Interviews with a wide range of American and military officials also suggest that Mr. Maliki overestimated his military’s abilities and underestimated the scale of the resistance. The Iraqi prime minister also displayed an impulsive leadership style that did not give his forces or that of his most powerful allies, the American and British military, time to prepare. [...]