Sunday evening I discussed the insurgent strategy of bombing an ice cream shop in Baghdad. George Will gives his take on this event today:
What Will is describing is a stand off of impotence. The insurgents are unable to sustain an attack which can topple the government, but the government is unable to stop the insurgencts from making their impotent attacks. Logic suggest that the government is still in the stronger position.
On Sunday night Iraqi insurgents bombed the Al Riadhy ice cream parlor in Baghdad, bringing to mind a movie that was much on the minds of some U.S. military leaders on the eve of the war with Iraq. The 1965 Italian movie "The Battle of Algiers" depicted France's military struggle in the second half of the 1950s to subdue the Algerian uprising against French governance of that country. One particularly horrifying scene showed the placing and then the explosion of three terrorist bombs in crowded businesses, one of them a shop where, in a riveting cinematic moment, a small child was enjoying an ice cream cone.
The differences between the Algerian insurgency and today's Iraqi insurgency are, of course, profound. In the former, North Africans were rising in the name of self-determination against rule by Europeans. Since the Jan. 30 elections, Iraqi insurgents have been fighting an Iraqi government, albeit an embryonic one with a dangerously protracted gestation period.
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The Algerian insurgency was fueled by the most potent "ism" of a century of isms -- nationalism. In contrast, one of the strange, almost surreal, aspects of the Iraqi insurgency is its lack of ideological content. Most of the insurgents are "FREs" -- former regime elements -- who simply want to return to power.
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Iraq's insurgents are degenerate Hobbesians -- Hobbes's subtlety reduced to the ruthless cunning of one idea: By promiscuously dispensing death, thereby creating the chaos of a Hobbesian state of nature, the insurgents hope to delegitimize the Iraqi government for its failure to provide the primary social good: freedom from fear of violent death.
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The basis of the insurgency's hope -- desperate and implausible but not completely delusional -- is also the basis of American hopefulness: Iraq now has an Iraqi government. Another Iraqi government -- nasty and brutish -- will come, in time, if today's evolving government seems incapable of preventing Iraqi life from being nasty, brutish and, often, short.
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