Via praktike at American Footprints, Abdul Aziz al-Hakim has a spectacular idea about how to curb violence in Iraq: give everyone guns:
The leader of Iraq’s most powerful political party said Monday that Iraqis should band together and take up arms to protect their homes and neighborhoods against widespread lawlessness.
Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, whose Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq is the leading member of the coalition of Shiite Muslim parties governing Iraq, said the formation of so-called people’s committees was one of four essential steps the country must take to curb rampant violence.
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Hakim’s contention that neighborhoods should form their own defense committees — his fourth step — is shared by many Iraqis who feel they cannot rely on their country’s security forces or foreign troops to protect them. Others, however, have expressed fears that the people’s committees would amount to nothing more than de facto militias in a country where militia attacks have caused much of the bloodshed.
If that was allowed to occur, it would be nothing less than the largest scale example of Fareed Zakaria’s “democratization of violence” meme yet. Nothing would push Iraq further down the path of civil war than arming neighborhoods of people and asking them to fend for themselves. In a country that identifies more along tribal and sectarian lines than ones based on nationality, this would be disastrous. The basic definition of a state posits that the state, and the state alone, holds a monopoly on violence. While that is nowhere near the reality in Iraq currently — violence is doled out routinely by Sunni insurgents and Shi’ite and Kurdish militias — Hakim’s Mad Max-themed Neighborhood Watch program would officially push the country past the point of no return.
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