Vigilantes in Baghdad

Frederick Turner:

Isn't something missing in the current accounts of the new wave of Iraqi violence? The situation has changed quite radically, it seems, but nobody is saying exactly how. Here is how it strikes this naïve observer.

The attacks against our soldiers go on, but there is no surprise there. The suicide bombings of markets, mosques, bus stations, and police recruiting places do too—nothing new there either. The campaign against those courageous individuals who are trying to create a democratic Iraqi government also continues, as does the opportunistic violence of criminal gangs.

What has changed is that all of a sudden there is a whole new category of killing going on. Almost every night scores of individuals, obviously chosen and targeted with care, clearly known personally to their attackers, are being tortured and murdered. Who are they? And who are the killers?

The Press, it seems, is deliberately not answering these questions. Neither Democrats nor Republicans are giving the matter any public attention beyond deploring it in loud but utterly unspecific tones—and this in an election season. Even the Iraqi government is trying to hush it up; recently they forbade the hospitals to give out information about the victims.

It almost seems as if neither side—the ones who want the Iraqi government to fail, and those who want it to succeed--can afford to answer the awkward questions. Here is a hypothesis.

The Sunni extremists, al Qaeda-type Wahhabis and Saddamite Baathist fascists in uneasy alliance, perceived that they were losing the war in Iraq. A legitimate government had been voted in and the Americans were preparing to leave it in charge. It was a disaster. They resorted to a desperation measure: to attempt to foment a religious war between Shiites and Sunnis, in the hope of fishing in troubled waters. In doing so they unleashed a very terrible force. That force is not, as often claimed, civil war as such, or even religious war.

It is something with which we have become quite familiar in Latin America: vigilanteism on a massive scale—murder squads and desaparacidos—the force of civil society itself in extremis.

When there is a significant fraction of the population that will not join in political compromise, whether because of ideological idealism, addiction to supernatural power, or the passion for revenge, civil society is faced with a diabolical paradox.

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Death squads are distinctly better than suicide bombers. Their members want to survive and have something to lose—they envisage a future in which they can stop killing and get on with family life, while the horrible nightmares gradually fade.

In a sense, the great new weapon, the suicide bomber—which had seemed to all the world to be irresistible—has, like all weapons, shown its fatal flaw. That flaw was first revealed in the Jordan bombing of the hotel wedding party, which radicalized Jordanians against al Qaeda. Now it has turned to bite the radicals in Baghdad. If civil society finds itself threatened by utter chaos, it may resort to free-enterprise war against its enemy....

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Turner believes the "cleansing" must precede a national reconciliation. Are all the bodies really the remnants of al Qaeda? There is no way to know. For all their killing, there has been a reduction in human bomb attacks. However the logic of the attacks is playing into the hands of those in this country who want to lose the war in Iraq. It just gives them another excuse to cut and run.