Not Exactly Sun Tsu

After dinner tonight (Bean Bake with Corn Bread; yum), my wife and I talked a little about an article I had read in the Washington Post. They had accompanied General Petraeus on a helicopter tour of Baghdad while he looked at the city, looking for signs of life, and signs otherwise. At one point, he said that it might be that Iraq would have to learn, as did Northern Ireland, to live with the concept of occasional violence. I was surprised by the bluntness of that assessment. I am not a military person, or a historian, but I thought he might well have something there. It'd be nice to get to a peaceful society, but perhaps thats not in the cards.

I don't think that the plan to have the Iraqi prime minister orchestrate an integrated Iraqi ownership of the environment is going to work -- at least, not along the lines that Bush lays out -- because I don't believe that the people there give a fig for democracy as a concept. What they want, I believe, is to wake up in the morning and be pretty sure that they're going to make it to the end of the day; anything at a higher level is immaterial to their daily lives. If thats done by democracy, fine; if thats done by local tyrants, equally fine. I have a hunch that after so long in a society where it really, really matters what your religion is, and you trust people more on the degree of consanguinity than by anything else, people aren't going to respect the strictures of an arbitrary society. They're not going to wake up one morning and say well, democracy is a good idea, lets give it a try. They may think that it sounds good, but they don't really know it, and they do know that if they keep their local chief happy, to whom they're bound by tradition or blood or whatever, they're more likely to get to the end of the day. They may prefer it otherwise, but they're pragmatic. And all our posturing about the wonders of democracy aren't going to mean squat against that unless we can make it something that they actually want to do -- something that they're willing to die for. Frankly, thats a hell of a lot to ask.

And what of the culture that says its normal for people to amass private armies? People who have those armies have to be reckoned with, and they'd be tough to eliminate. A really strong central force -- shall we call it a dictator? -- could do that, though. It could make it unwise to visibly oppose the desires of the central force, and make that attitude stick. Can Maliki do that? Well, I'm not a political scientist, either, but I really doubt it. He certainly can't have the military force to do it. Whether he has the political force is another question. He's got to be very, very good about making deals, cutting ties and making new ones as the situation warrants. I think that given his own druthers, he'd end up with a network of loose groups , vague regions of power -- kind of like the idea of the Mafia and its structure. Is that desirable? Probably not -- but it works. And part of that might well be that every so often people wake up in the morning and find out that the guy who used to be the local warlord isn't, anymore, because last night he got blown up.

Its an awful way to live -- but its a way to live.