Greg Djerejian has a lengthy but informative post talking about the role of the organized militias (as in “trained and equipped by the U.S. or Britain” organized) in kidnappings and murders. Much is drawn from today’s article in the Washington Post, Militias on the Rise Across Iraq. Both are good reads, as are the comments on GD’s blog. The comment by JEB is also worth reading. Most interestingly:

Where Greg and I disagree — and we have gone round the track on this subject more than once here — is on two points. First, I don’t think he takes sufficiently into account the enormous difficulty in establishing a liberal democracy in any Arab country, and particularly this one. Like him I think the administration has made many lamentable political, military and other mistakes; unlike him I felt from the start that this objective was poorly chosen because even if everything was done right the odds of failure were still very high. In general I think poorly of making vast commitments that can only work out well if someone else does things they have never done before.

I would state this another way… learn from history. When external forces come in to help create democracy, it helps to have countries that already see themselves as a unit. Countries held together by strongmen or by force don’t generally transition to democracies when motivated by external factors. Iraq is a clear case and point of this.

I’m still confused by the President’s pre-war ruminations that some didn’t believe Muslims could be free. Not sure where that was coming from or who was framing it in terms of religion or race or whatever, but if he’s talking about people like JEB who believed that history was against our effort, then perhaps the President was trying to reframe a historical lesson into a racist message. It’s not racist to say that our only successes in nation building have come in countries with long histories or traditions of being a single, internally peaceful country.