People in Baghdad have been protesting to US troops regarding the breakdown of law and order in that city and elsewhere in Iraq. The solution is simple… when the protesters turn up, lead them to one of the large piles of abandoned small arms dotting Iraq, issue each one of them with a Kalashnikov, 30 rounds of ammunition and a fluorescent yellow armband with the letters INW (Iraqi Neighbourhood Watch) in Latin and Arabic letters, and then tell them “Scram… this is your city so take care of the problem yourself and only call us if things get really out of hand”.
At a stroke the Iraqis are given the means to stop the looters, they are empowered to take their post-Ba’athist future into their own hands and they are shown that the coalition is serious about Iraqis running Iraq.
Will this mean some weapons get into the hands of the wacko bad guys? Sure, but those guys are already armed. However the upside is that for every one of them, there will be many dozens of normal armed Iraqi people who just want to live a normal life and who then will be able to say “never will be suffer this nightmare again”… and say it with a Kalashnikov in their hands. Ba’athist or Islamist thugs swaggering around your neighbourhood? Now that the Iraqis have had a taste of freedom, let them cap those bastards.
All political power does indeed grow out of the barrel of a gun… so lets make sure everyone has one.
Quite. There are more good guys than bad guys.
Actually, the American approach to law and order being employed in Baghdad is closer to this than the Brit’s in Basra. It will be most interesting to contrast the two cities as things progress.
“All political power does indeed grow out of the barrel of a gun… so lets make sure everyone has one.”
Yup. The American Experiment has survived for over two hundred years with its citizens being armed.
Despite all the pissing and moaning from the pomo Left, it’s still in pretty good shape.
Hand out them AK-47s and Tokarevs in Baghdad.
This is a parody, right? Right???
As Robert H. Heinlein said “An Armed Society is A Polite Society”.
parody? this has to be one of most-in-the-slot real-world relevent common sense intensive suggestions i have read in many months!
there are not anywhere near enough american and british troops to keep order everywhere so what the hell do you suggest the people in baghdad do gonzales? hire a bunch of american lawyerz and threaten the looters with a fucking class action?
Hey, BigFire, you beat me to it with the great Bob Heinlein quote!
As for the British approach, there is only so much one can achieve by playing the local lads at football (not soccer, dammit).
Been some interesting comments out there about why, given that quite a lot of Iraqis have and had guns, they were able to be subjected by Saddam in the first place. I guess what it shows is that owning guns is one thing, having a vibrant liberal and individualist culture is another.
The Brits shot dead 5 looters in Basra yesterday, so I think it is unfair to accuse them of being too ‘soft’.
“I guess what it shows is that owning guns is one thing, having a vibrant liberal and individualist culture is another.”
hmm… before you slap too many Americans on the back, and berate Iraqis for their lack of individual thinking, i think getting your shit together & bringing together organised resistance under a police state is yet another thing, even with rifles.
“All political power does indeed grow out of the barrel of a gun… so lets make sure everyone has one.”
I’d question the “all” clause… there are many groups who’ve managed to be politically influential without ever even suggesting armed violence. Where did their power come from?
Hey, A_T, I don’t actually disagree with you on that point. Some groups do get influence without violence.
Not sure how that insight would have applied to Iraqis prior to their liberation by Britain and US.
The basis of political power is control over the means of violence… even if you gain power by ‘democratic’ means, it is the means of violence which backs up your laws. Your ability to enforce those laws is at least in part a function of how able people are to resist the state’s means of violence. There is a complex calculus between acceptance of the state’s moral authority and how easy it can force acceptance… the less moral authority it has the more it has to use force. For example entire communities of moonshiners simply rejected the authority of the state to outlaw what they were doing and actively resisted the state with guns to the point where considerable areas of rural USA were de facto no-go areas for the police.
Sure, the state can use its force to crush resistance and could have done so in the 1930’s, but with a armed population, the ‘pain threshold’ for doing that is much higher… guns raise the cost of enforcing unpopular laws, if you like. A few Kalashnikovs cannot stop a well organized tyranny but they sure can make it harder for one to get going in the first place.
So yes, political power, when you regress the equation back, is always about a gun in the end.
Which is all very well, but I understand the Iraqi populace has been pretty well-armed all along (with not particularly encouraging results), and I heard on the radio that US troops are encouraging them to turn in their weapons to be destroyed. Two observations which make me most unhappy.
Of course private arms cannot stop a mechanised brigade from flattening your town or an airforce from dropping poison gas on you. The idea that having an armed population alone is a sufficient bulwark against tyranny is bonkers regardless of how many of my good buddies at the NRA might like to think that is true.
However as ‘Fritz the Cat’ pointed out, it makes harder for would-be tyrants to get thing going in the first place. Arms in the hands of many individuals can prevent the sort of local intimidation that characterises almost all proto-tyrannies… and clearly it sure as hell discourages looters (ask any Korean from Los Angeles).
I agree with the re-arming of the Iraqi population. Perry’s plan sounds simple and effective.
One might be tempted to say, in a strange twist on that infamous Marie Antoinette quote, “Let them eat lead…”
“The basis of political power is control over the means of violence… even if you gain power by ‘democratic’ means, it is the means of violence which backs up your laws. Your ability to enforce those laws is at least in part a function of how able people are to resist the state’s means of violence.”
Absolutely – and here in Borsetshire we could do with a few more AK47s… One of the many curious things about the statist anti-gun types is that while they think the possession of firearms by you & me suggests an atavistic, psychopathic gun-nut mentality, and is deeply corrupting, possession of bigger badder guns by the agents of the State has no such corrupting effect. The same people have a blind spot about the State’s resort to violence, or the threat of it, against its own people, and tend to be starry eyed (to say the least) about the relationship between individuals and the British State.
Universal armament in Iraq might be no bad thing, though the comment about traditions of liberal thought & individualism are apposite, given the despotism and mental slavery that seem endemic among Arab peoples.
Baghdad merchants fire on looters
…US soldiers shot dead a Baghdad merchant who was defending his shop with a Kalashnikov assault rifle against looters, neighbours told an AFP photographer.
The merchant pulled his rifle on the thieves when they began sacking the shop. When US soldiers approached the area, the looters told them that the shopkeeper was a member of Saddam Hussein’s Fedayeen paramilitary force.
The American troops opened fire with heavy machineguns, killing the man, the neighbours said.
Scott, that is dreadful news
I definitely agree w/ you that we shouldn’t disarm Iraqi civilians, and to be honest, given that we’re there (there are times that the world must be accepted as it is) I won’t complain if our troops shoot looters, armed robbers, and rapists (assuming they’re caught in the act instead of accused people being shot w/o trial).
I’d hate to see our invasion to keep Iraqis from being killed by their own govt (a claimed goal, at least) touch off Iraqis dying from simple street crime.
Maybe we should leave the Syrians alone and start liberating closer to home:
Police seek national crossbow ban
April 13, 2003
NSW Police Minister John Watkins will seek a national ban on all crossbows following an attack which seriously injured two schoolgirls near Port Stephens, north of Newcastle.
… Mr Watkins said the incident had drawn attention to the problems of interstate and national controls.
“Crossbows are killing machines – nothing else,” he said.
Does anyone else find it ironic that old Soviet rifles are being considered as defenders of essential liberty?
Finally, after all these years, products of the Soviet military-industrial complex can be brought to bear on the side of freedom.
T.J.: irony indeed, and see this earlier Samizdata post by Perry, “Kapitalist Kalashnikov“.
My only quibble with Brian’s statements in this article: why 30 rounds? A case is 1000 rounds, and there are countless cases being destroyed by allied troops in senseless ammo dump explosions. Stop those explosions, and start issuing ammo and rifles to Iraqi citizens.
I wouldn’t jump to the conclusion that the Iraqis are well-armed. The basis for this belief is, as far as I can tell, a single story that gun shops in Baghdad were doing a bang-up business. That story has been pretty brutally critiqued, and it is by no means clear that folks who weren’t tight with the regime had any access to guns or ammo. The ability of fedayeen with a 9mm in their waistband to do pretty much what they wanted indicates that most Iraqis were disarmed by the regime, for example.
Regardless, an armed population is probably a necessary but not a sufficient condition for liberty. I say let Iraqis arm themselves (no need for the state to buy them guns, is there?). The last thing we want to do is alienate the Iraqis by instituting and enforcing gun control.
I wouldn’t jump to the conclusion that the Iraqis are well-armed. The basis for this belief is, as far as I can tell, a single story that gun shops in Baghdad were doing a bang-up business. That story has been pretty brutally critiqued, and it is by no means clear that folks who weren’t tight with the regime had any access to guns or ammo. The ability of fedayeen with a 9mm in their waistband to do pretty much what they wanted indicates that most Iraqis were disarmed by the regime, for example.
Regardless, an armed population is probably a necessary but not a sufficient condition for liberty. I say let Iraqis arm themselves (no need for the state to buy them guns, is there?). The last thing we want to do is alienate the Iraqis by instituting and enforcing gun control.
A well armed citizenry to battle a tyrannical dictatorship would mean that the citizens would have the same tanks, missiles, RPGs, etc. Terminology is everything, doncha think?
MommaBear: of course they should be “allowed” to own those items. No government can own anything which “its” citizens can’t own.
“I wouldn’t jump to the conclusion that the Iraqis are well-armed. The basis for this belief is, as far as I can tell, a single story that gun shops in Baghdad were doing a bang-up business.”
There were a couple of other stories in the same vein, but still it’s a good point. When I read those stories I started wondering if maybe Iraq actually had a South African style apartheid system, where Sunnis could own guns but Shiites and Kurds couldn’t (legally). Unfortunately (if not surprisingly) the media wasn’t interested in investigating further.
Other Scott,
As per the story of the shopkeeper who was killed by Marines. A crucial detail of the story is that other locals, who later turned out to be looters that that the poor guy had turned away, went to the Marines and pointed him out as a Fedayeen. There have have been numerous other stories of U.S. military allowing armed Iraqis to act as neighborhood watch.
Let’s distribute the captured small arms to the Iraqi populace (that should confuse the arabs who say we are on a Crusade) and if there are any left over they could be given to the crime riddled populace of a certain island nation so they can shoot a few burglars as well.
Giving back the captured arms to the Iraqi population would be a good idea and I agree with Moma Bear (as I have written before on Samizdata) – to actually have any effect on a statist government one must have an equal deterent to their force. The right to bear arms was decreed at a time when governments basically had guns. Now they have a lot more sophisticated weapons and that power must be balanced in a democracy.
So to stop any possiblity of Saddam returning we must arm the Iraqi people with suitable equivalents that mnight be used aginst them. At the minimum we need to give them their own nuclear weapon (well it has guarenteed our stability, has it not).
So perhaps if we manage to find any A bombs in Iraq we can give it back to the people (as they have obviously misplaced it… :0)
Err…hmmm….what am I saying!?! I must be beginning to forget why we went to war anyway. We must take the guns and bombs from them! Oh boy, this is sure confusing for a barker of little brain….
Yes, it’s quite possible, even likely that the shopkeeper was Fedayeen (or at least a Ba’ath Party member). One point that people miss about the looting was that most the things worth looting were owned by the regime, or its apparatchiks. If you owned a store, you probably had to be a party member in order to be allowed to.
There’s also a distinct possibility that some or all of the treasures at the museum might have actually been spirited away by fleeing regime members…
And I in fact find it difficult to believe that there was wide-spread gun ownership among the Iraqi people, despite the stories about the brisk business at the gun shops. I suspect that, again, one had to be a Sunni (and probably a party member) to own a gun. That would have been who Saddam expected to defend him.
I too am unclear as to why the impoverished average Iraqi (assets: 1 cinderblock shack) would be queueing at the gunsmiths if he already had an AK.
Here’s more on Iraqi self-defense from Reason