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William Sturgiss Lind,
Director of the Center for Cultural Conservatism
at the Free Congress Foundation, is a native
of Cleveland, Ohio, born July 9, 1947. He
graduated magna cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa
from Dartmouth College in 1969 and received
a Master's Degree in History from Princeton
University in 1971. He worked as a legislative
aide for armed services for Senator Robert
Taft, Jr., of Ohio from 1973 through 1976
and held a similar position with Senator Gary
Hart of Colorado from 1977 through 1986. He
joined Free Congress Foundation in 1987.
Mr. Lind is author of the Maneuver Warfare
Handbook (Westview Press, 1985); co-author,
with Gary Hart, of America Can Win: The Case
for Military Reform (Adler & Adler, 1986);
and co-author, with William H. Marshner, of
Cultural Conservatism: Toward a New National
Agenda (Free Congress Foundation, 1987). He
has written extensively for both popular media,
including The Washington Post, The New York
Times, and Harper's, and professional military
journals, including The Marine Corps Gazette,
U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings and Military
Review.
Mr. Lind co-authored the prescient article,
"The Changing Face of War: Into the Fourth
Generation," which was published in The Marine
Corps Gazette in October, 1989 and which first
propounded the concept of "Fourth Generation
War." Mr. Lind and his co-authors predicted
that states would increasingly face threats
not from other states, but from non-state
forces whose primary allegiance was to their
religion, ethnic group or ideology. Following
the events of September 11, 2001, the article
has been credited for its foresight by The
New York Times Magazine and The Atlantic Monthly.
Mr. Lind is co-author with Paul M. Weyrich
of the monograph: "Why Islam is a Threat to
America and The West." He is the author of
"George W. Bush's `War on Terrorism': Faulty
Strategy and Bad Tactics?" Both were published
in 2002 by the Free Congress Foundation.
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Lind Article Archive
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March 8, 2005
[Have an opinion on a William Lind column? Sound off in the Discussion
Boards.]
One of the classic signs of ideology at work is the redefinition of words to empty them of their meaning. An article by Greg Jaffe in the February 16 Wall Street Journal, "New Factor in Iraq: Irregular Brigades Fill Security Void," describes the rapid spread of militias in that unhappy place, which is probably now more accurately called Mesopotamia. The story is based largely on the work of one U.S. Marine Corps officer, Major Chris Wales, in tracking the new militias. But it also quotes Major Wales as saying, "We don't call them militias. Militias are...illegal."
Well, that certainly solves the problem. A militia isn't a militia if we don't call it a militia. And we can't call it a militia, because we have decreed there shall be no militias in Iraq. King Canute, call your office.
Let me quickly add that I am not pointing a finger at Major Wales. In today's Marine Corps, a major is a minor, and any major who didn't use Newspeak (especially when talking to the press) would quickly find himself the MWR officer in Barstow.
Generals, it seems, can be a bit more frank. The March 2 Washington Post, reporting on General Abizaid's testimony to the Senate Armed Services Committee, had this to say:
Asked by lawmakers about irregular Iraqi militia springing up
around the country, Abizaid said the help of such militia in
providing security for the elections was "in some ways a good
thing." In the long run, however, they should be incorporated
with Iraqi government forces. "Ultimately...it's destabilizing,"
he said.
The proliferation of militias, growing dependence of the Iraqi government and the U.S. on those militias to fight Sunni insurgents and our obvious inability to control the militias all point to the bottom line of the war in Iraq: Iraq is not moving closer to becoming a state again, and it may be moving further away from doing so. Local, private armies, often for hire, are a classic sign that the state is weak or non-existent. If a state does not have a monopoly on organized violence, it is not a state. It cannot bring order. Such order as exists is local and is enforced by local military forces, which are militias whether or not Americans call them that. The absence of a state breeds militias, and the militias are in turn both a sign and a cause of the absence of the state.
The proliferation of militias points to another fact about the war in Iraq: it is increasingly taking on the nature of a civil war. In the Fourth Generation stew of militias, gangs, groups of insurgents and so on, some fault lines seem to be emerging. The new militias are largely Shiite (the Kurds have an old and very capable militia, the Peshmerga), they are aligned loosely in support of Iraq's new Shiite-dominated government (but not controlled by that government) and their main purpose is to fight the insurgents, who are Sunnis. It is fairly clear where this script is heading.
Like the American destruction of Fallujah and the recent Iraqi elections, the rise and spread of Shiite militias devoted to fighting Sunni insurgents puts ever-greater pressure on Iraq's Sunnis to cast their lot with the insurgency. Shiite militias in particular leave them little choice; who else but the insurgents will protect them from Shiite militiamen? The situation in Germany during the Thirty Years' War may be an analogy: though many tried, few German princes could avoid casting their lots either with the Protestants or with the Catholics. Neutrality meant you became the victim of both.
So what is the U.S. to do, beyond not calling Iraqi militias "militias?" There is nothing we can do. The Wall Street Journal quotes Lt. Col. James Bullion, who works for General Petraeus, as saying, "There is no way we can stop the Iraqis from doing something they want to do. This is their country and their army now. We can't put that genie back in the bottle."
Better still is General Petraeus's own comment: "I want to get the hell out of here." Amen.
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© 2005 William S. Lind. William S. Lind
is Director for the Center for Cultural Conservatism for the Free
Congress Foundation. All opinions expressed in this article are
the author's and do not necessarily reflect those of Military.com.
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