by Russell Greer

Created on: July 02, 2007   Last Updated: July 03, 2007

Recently, I saw America's self-styled "Ethics Tsar," Bill Bennett, author of The Book of Virtues, being interviewed on one of the morning television news gabfests. While I questioned the legitimacy of him commenting on military-related matters, given his personal lack of uniformed service to our country, I did agree with one very salient point he made regarding the apparent disaster that has become U.S. involvement in Iraq. Alluding to controlling insurgencies, he maintained that to do so, one had to "have a monopoly on the violence." While this point may be self-evident to some, I appreciated the brilliant phrasing, "monopoly on the violence." If Bill Bennett can see it, why can't the Bush Administration that pushed us into this mess?

Simply put, strength will always trump weakness, perceived or real, in the murky arena of Middle East politics. As long as our enemies perceive weakness in us, we will have a difficult time gaining the ultimate upper hand in places like Iraq.

Let's examine those who have monopolized violence and thus controlled insurgencies and politics in the Middle East. Freshest in our minds, of course, is Saddam Hussein himself. There was no large-scale sectarian violence per se under his regime. Certainly, his Sunni henchmen committed atrocities against Kurds, Shi'ites, and political dissenters of various stripes at his bidding, but the Hussein Clan from Tikrit firmly held the monopoly on violence in Iraq prior to the spring of 2003; thus, no "sectarian violence" of the sort we are presently seeing. Simply put, Saddam was a mean enough sociopath to keep the pot from boiling over.

This idea begs us to ask the question, "Are the Iraqis better off now than they were under Saddam and his Tikriti clansmen?" I don't know. I would like to think the "Iraqis" are better off now, simply because it pains me to think that good, well-intentioned U.S. troops may be marching on the wrong side of history, but I just don't know. While Saddam and his hoodlums were responsible for their share of grief and mischief, it now appears that the Shi'ite Mahdi militias are horning in on the atrocious behavior on a grand scale.

One might ask, "With nearly 150,000 armed-to-the-teeth U.S. combat troops in Iraq, with the massive air power at their disposal, don't we have a monopoly on the violence?" No, we don't. Originally, the senseless twaddle spewing forth from then-Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, was that Iraq could be taken by 55,000 U.S. Special Forces. Who

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