Parcel Post for Militia -Who Will Sign for these Missiles?

Remember the partial hysteria in America over the militia “movement” in the aftermath of the Oklahoma City bombing? I think it may have even nabbed a Newsweek or Time cover – fear the overzealous bigoted rural white guy! Of course there was no “movement” to speak of, but in any event I got to thinking back to those days in the midst of the Israel – Hezbollah war.

Hezbollah is a terrorist militia inside Lebanon. Now, one could understand that a large government might not be keeping track of a small bunch of spirited hunters buying combat fatigues and running around playing war games in Michigan, but how exactly does it go unnoticed by the government when a militia takes delivery of a couple thousand rockets?

The answer is that it doesn’t go unnoticed – it just goes unpunished because the government doesn’t have the ability to stop it. In fact, the recent cease-fire triumph of diplomacy, which calls for the Lebanese army/government to disarm Hezbollah, was dampened a bit by the candid admission of the government that it isn’t capable of disarming Hezbollah. Why this fact wasn’t obvious to everyone from the get go is beyond me – do you think the Lebanese government was saying to itself “of course we can disarm them, but they really aren’t a threat to anyone until they get at least 10 thousand missiles, so we’ll just sit back and keep an eye on them.”

Government has famously been defined as a monopoly on violence – that is, the state typically grants to itself the exclusive right to smack people around when they aren’t obeying the law. There are of course legitimate governments – where the leaders and the laws they enact are chosen, ultimately, with the participation of the governed (in varying degrees). And then there are illegitimate governments – where the leaders grab that coveted monopoly on violence because they are just flat out better at it than all would-be competitors. And then there are organizations like Hezbollah, which technically are not in charge of the government, but which might as be; John O’Sullivan from National Review online made this point earlier this week:

This structure — an electoral “party” allied to a terrorist militia — was pioneered in its modern form by Sinn Fein-IRA in Northern Ireland. It is now being imitated in places as far afield as the Basque country in Spain and in Lebanon. It means, of course, that democracy cannot really function. If such a hybrid party loses the election, its milita can bring out the guns. Everyone knows that and shrinks from opposing the terrorist party. So Hezbollah will not need to win elections, merely to frighten those parties that do win into going along with its, er, policy preferences. Making Sinn Fein-IRA a respectable partner in the “peace process” continues to provide terrorists everywhere with a roadmap around democracy and toward power.

Maintaining an illegitimate monopoly on violence is only possible if you are willing to spill a little blood in the cause. As one writer pointed out:

Hezbollah has a crucial advantage over any competitors for ultimate control of the south —… the sheer will that motivates it to fight and die for its cause. Are French and Italian troops willing to die for the enforcement of Resolution 1559, calling for the disarming of Hezbollah? To ask the question is to answer it.

Seems like that is a problem beyond Lebanon, arguably for most of the Middle East – countries not already being run by Islamofascists are beholden to them. The Iraq “insurgency” seems to be about that very same thing – the cost of letting a legitimate government get established in the Middle East is the threat that other constituencies in other countries might be so bold as to think, with a little help from the West, they too could taste a little freedom. So Iran and Syria funnel as many of their lunatics as possible into Iraq to make hey – even if it fails to stop Iraq from eventually achieving stability, it at least increases the cost of Western intervention, and therefore dampens the potential contagion effect, which is what they fear most.

We are seeing the Arab world embracing the dominoes theory in reverse – we contested communism incrementally in country after country for fear of it taking hold and spreading from there – the Middle East fascists are contesting democracy incrementally in Iraq for fear of it taking hold and spreading from there.
One could argue that the U.S. effort to transform the Middle East via Iraq is hopelessly Utopian, but that argument rests upon a comparative assessment of the strength and desire of the enemy versus our own, rather than as an a priori fact. If the idea was hopelessly Utopian independent of the actions of others in the region, why would they be so keen to screw things up in Iraq? Clearly they fear that if they don’t act, they do so at their own peril.