Soccer Dad

Bottom up concilliation

In a network of Truces David Brooks argues:

The surge didn’t create the network of truces, but the truces couldn’t have happened without the surge. More than 70,000 local council members are paid by the Americans. They rely on the U.S. military to enforce bargains and deter truce-breaking. Thanks to these arrangements, ethno-sectarian violence dropped by 90 percent between June 2007 and March 2008. That’s the result of political progress, not just counterinsurgency techniques.

It has become common to belittle these truces. After all, they are not written by legislators on parchment. And indeed there’s a significant chance that they will indeed collapse and the country will devolve into anarchy.

But in certain societies, this is the way order is established, through what Salzman calls “balanced opposition.” As long as the network of truces holds, then the next president (Democrat or Republican) will have an overwhelming incentive to nurture the fragile peace.

One of the fallacies of the Palestinian-Israeli peace process was that the PLO was the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people so that Israel had to deal with the PLO. As it happened the PLO was one of many illegitimate representatives of the Palestinian people. Imposing the PLO on Israel (and the Palestinians) was a folly of the first order.

Maybe the idea of relying on the central government is essential to success in Iraq has been downgraded and that stability will emerge from the little fiefdoms now being created around the country.