Militias, Vigilantes, Death Squads

Charles Tripp on the Grammar of Violence in Iraq

At a Downing Street meeting in November 2002 attended by Tony Blair, Jack Straw and six academics familiar with Iraq and the Middle East, two things became clear. The first was that Straw thought post-Saddam Iraq would be much like post-Soviet Russia and could thus be easily pigeonholed as that strange creature, a ‘transitional society’. Either he had been persuaded of this by the recycled Cold Warriors clustering round the Bush administration, or they had failed to inform their ‘key ally’ of their determination to dismantle Iraq’s state and security structures. More ominously, Blair seemed wholly uninterested in Iraq as a complex and puzzling political society, wanting confirmation merely that deposing Saddam Hussein would remove ‘evil’ from the country.

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[*] 7 July 2005, 26 January and 2 November 2006.

[†] Ahmed Hashim’s Insurgency and Counter-Insurgency in Iraq (Hurst, 176 pp., £20, March 2006, 978 1 85065 795 8) provides a clear and authoritative account of the shifting world of these resistance organisations.