market share

Iraq’s new Prime Minister has promised to restore the Iraqi state’s monopoly on the use of violence. This piece in the New York Times shows what the job involves.

Reining in Iraq's official and unofficial armies is the most urgent task confronting Iraq's new leaders. In speeches and private conversations, Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki says he intends to clamp down on the death squads operating within the Iraqi government, and to disarm the militias that provide the street muscle for Iraq's political parties.

That presages an enormous political battle, one that extends beyond the Interior Ministry's police officers and paramilitary soldiers.

A larger and possibly more decisive struggle looms to disarm myriad other armed groups, including the Shiite militias, most of them answerable to the Shiite political parties that dominate the new government.

The article doesn’t deal with the insurgents, who obviously have quite a share in the Iraqi violence market, as do the various foreign troops and mercenaries not under Iraqi government control or influence. Additionally there are:

Shi’ite militias, notably the BADR brigade and the Mahdi Army. They have influence over, respectively, the Iraqi Police and the Interior Ministry commandos.

The new Iraqi Army, balkanized into ethnic and confessional units.

The Facilities Protection Service, effectively operating as the private armies of different ministries.

Kurdish peshmerga, operating as the military and security forces of Iraqi Kurdistan.

Informal tribal and neighbourhood based militias, formed in response to the death squads operating within Iraqi security ministries.

Miscellaneous criminal gangs.

Given this, it’s debatable whether the Iraqi government as a whole has much of a share in the Iraqi violence market, let alone being capable of enforcing a monopoly. From this morning’s Stratfor mailout:

A government has been formed in Iraq. It is a defective government, in the sense that it does not yet have a defense or interior minister. It is an ineffective government, insofar as the ability to govern directly is at this point limited institutionally, politically and functionally. Ultimately, what exists now is less a government than a political arrangement between major elements of Iraq's three main ethnic groups. And that is what makes this agreement of potentially decisive importance: If it holds, it represents the political foundation of a regime.

If it holds.

If it holds, the rest is almost easy. If it doesn't hold, the rest is impossible. Therefore, the fate of this political arrangement will define the future of Iraq and, with that, the future of the region -- and in some ways, the future of the American position in the region. It is not hyperbole to say that everything depends on this deal.