What is Going On in Iraq?

Just what exactly is going on in Iraq? Is it civil war? If not, just what is it?

Frederick Turner is willing to guess. It is the hour of the vigilante.

He asks what civil society can do when it is opposed by refuseniks, people who refuse to give up when they have been defeated, but still keep up a desultory fusilade of bombings and suicides?

The answer is that you send out the death squads. The official government cannot do it. So it must delegate it to vigilantes.

Basically the killers are posses of self-organized vigilantes, who know their local area, who know who the bombers are, and who the bombers' relatives are.

...

But death squads are rational, in their own horrible way. They may prove, as they did in Latin America, to be a pretty effective method of wiping out implacable enemies of social order and preparing the way for democratic and law-abiding government. In living memory almost every decent and legal regime in Latin America was preceded by a chaotic period in which ordinary men armed themselves with guns, said goodnight to their families, and went out in groups to kill some local dissident.

...
The work of the vigilantes is the hideous and dark crime that Socrates and the Greek tragic dramatists hinted must underlie all civilization.

Is that what is going on in Iraq? The truth is, we do not know. We will only know after it is all over, whatever it is that is going down in Iraq right now.