Mario Loyola writes:
We are organizing and regularizing what amounts to a Sunni militia. If we could do with the Shiite militias what we are now doing with the Sunnis (who already have plenty of weapons) the war would essentially be over now.
It's interesting to watch conservative thinking from other areas -- in this case, gun control -- bleed over to things like civil reconstruction. In the conservative narrative of crime policy, if both the criminals and the civilians had Frank Castle style armories in their basements, society would enter some sort of lethal-force equilibrium, in which the fear of being shot would diminish the incentives to provoke a shooting. Thus: no crime! Others look at this strategy and see a recipe for more shoot-outs. It's hard to understand how a little internal warning bell doesn't go off when you transpose that optimistic view of America's inner cities into a chaotic country where one ethnic group is, far, far, far bigger than the other and both are struggling for power, but it's sort of interesting to watch.
Less so if you're an Iraqi, I imagine.
