Iraq is certainly in the hands of Iraqis, but which Iraqis? The appearance of the absence of rule of law, or the reality of its absence are disturbing. Sadr City is a slum with a population of two million. I’m doubtful that the entire area has been abandoned by U.S. and Iraqi troops. But vigilante acts are certainly taking place, and they need to be reined in. The cold, harsh reality is that if government doesn’t provide adequate security, someone will fill the vacuum and they won’t necessarily be well intentioned, impartial or unbiased.
In Sadr City, the Shiite section in Baghdad where the terrorist suspects were executed, government forces have vanished. The streets are ruled by aggressive teenagers with shiny soccer jerseys and machine guns.
They set up roadblocks and poke their heads into cars and detain whomever they want. Mosques blare warnings on loudspeakers for American troops to stay out. Increasingly, the Americans have been doing just that.
There seems to be no minimum age to join the action. A playful boy named Musa, who said he was 11 but looked about 8, was part of a 4-foot-tall militia struggling to drag chunks of concrete into the street to block cars on Monday.
“We’re guarding the road,” Musa explained.
He was carrying a toy pistol. Some of the other boys had real ones.
Across town in a busy shopping area in western Baghdad, a 15-minute gun battle broke out between security guards, more evidence of the authority vacuum.
Dispensing “justice” without courts, without law books and without the authority of the people you claim to be dispensing that justice for is a dangerous business. What is clear is that Iraq needs to move forward in seating the permanent government so that it can go about the business of changing parts of Iraq from Wild West style street justice over to a more measured system of dispensing justice. Iraqi leaders and politicians are not serving their people by allowing militias to roam parts of Baghdad.
Finding a way to integrate these men into authorized, regular security forces or to otherwise gainfully employ them seems the best option. Certainly, they shouldn’t be receiving their marching orders from a religious cleric who is unelected and has an unserved arrest warrant for murder hanging over his head.
The reality that must be faced though, is that Moqtada Al-Sadr has power, and that he is exercising that power in ways the are dubious at best. Omar at Iraq the Model calls al-Sadr a thug and more:
You form a multi-thousand men militia, you arm them with all kinds of weapons you can find, you fill them with hatred through your inflammatory speeches, you promise to use your militia to defend Iraq’s worst enemies, you accuse the Sunni of being Takfiri terrorists, accuse the US of supporting this terrorism and accuse Kurds and fellow Shia of being materialistic opportunists and puppets of the US occupier. And your Islamic militia attacks dozens of mosques and kills dozens of people over night.
And after all this you call yourself a patriot.
You are just as dangerous to Iraq as Saddam was or al-Qaeda is.
And just as Omar says, the mortars have been less evident these last few days, but death is still creeping around Baghdad conducting business slightly differently. The coalition must tread carefully as Iraqis decide the future of Iraq. Will the clerics rule or will men of reason end up dominating? The first would mean continued stagnation and bleak futures for common Iraqis while the latter would eventually bring prosperity and peace. Iraqis are overdue for some prosperity and peace.
The coalition can only move forward as fast as Iraqis allow it too. Progress is slowed and diffused by sectarianism, fanaticism and the reality that Iraq’s memes are centuries behind those which nations with modern value systems take for granted. Iraq is not a hopeless place, but it is a hard land filled with people who had grown up in the midst of conflict. If you’ve never known anything but war, then you might think war is all there is.