Today a suicide bomber in the Iraqi Parliament managed to kill eight people, and preliminary reports have it that the bomber was a security guard.
Whether or not the report of the bomber’s identity turns out to be true, the incident itself—which occurred within the highly-protected Green Zone—is another indication of how difficult security is in a failed nation with a history of enormous violence and no end of people with the motivation to sow chaos and fear. This was true in the days of Saddam, who “solved” the problem by killing everyone he suspected of being a threat, and those who were not, just for fun. And it’s true in today’s atmosphere, with attempts by so many to thwart the efforts by others to create a better nation in that long-beleaguered country.
The audience for today’s incident is twofold: the exhausted people of Iraq, and the far more easily exhausted people of the West. The word gets out through the MSM, which of course must report the incident and yet, in doing so, unwittingly and unwillingly becomes the instrument of the dissemination of terrorist propaganda.
Security in a failed and chaotic nation is incredibly difficult; who can be trusted? Despite the prevalence of rabid conspiracy theorists in our own country, the contrast couldn’t be greater between such nations and ourselves. The concept of a person charged with security at our own Congress being a counteragent, for example, is almost incomprehensible, although of course nothing is impossible.
Inside job assassinations such as this one are not just the province of Iraq, then or now. One exceedingly prominent example was that of Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, murdered by her Sikh bodyguards in 1984.
India isn’t the sort of country we think of as especially chaotic, but there is some recent Indian history that’s actually quite instructive on that score.
How many people are familiar with the reasons Indira Gandhi was assassinated, or the history of the Sikh insurgency in India? If not (and I certainly was one of those with only a vague familiarity with it prior to doing some research for this very post), you might want to do some reading.
In their campaign to secede from India and establish an independent nation, Sikh terrorists wreaked havoc in India, and the Indian government retaliated, hard. Very hard. And yet this sort of third-world-on-third-world violence caused (as is usually the case) hardly a ripple in the consciousness of most of us. However:
More than 250,000 Sikhs were killed by Indian security forces in Punjab between 1984 and 1992. It was also a period during which Sikh terrorists struck Indian targets seemingly at will.
That’s an awful lot of dead people, isn’t it? Indira Gandhi’s assassination was well-covered by the press, of course, but the larger context probably faded into the general background noise of third-world violence, a hum that’s been loud, constant, and generalized.
The immediate precipitating factor that was mentioned as motivation for the assassination was the Golden Temple assault in 1984, in which Indian forces killed approximately a thousand Sikhs holed up in the holiest of Sikh shrines. The government justification was that they were terrorists; the incident was regarded by Sikhs (or their propaganda) as the beginning of an Indian genocide against Sikhs in general.
But India’s Sikh problem, so out of control at the time, is now apparently under control (relatively speaking, at least). How did this happen? It appears that, starting around 1992, the Punjab government simply became tougher and more ruthless in crushing the movement. Human rights violations were common, but they worked, and the area has been relatively peaceful in the last decade.
It’s a sobering story. As I’ve written previously, in most third-world countries, the choice is between chaos and tyranny. Third-world countries unfortunately don’t have the luxury that we do of keeping their methods and hands relatively clean and worrying unduly about the finer points of human rights—although there are certainly variations of degree even in the Third World, and India was a paradise compared to a place like Saddam’s Iraq.
Oh, and another thing: Indira Gandhi’s successor, her son Rajiv, was in turn assassinated by the Tamil Tigers, those terrorists who brought us the suicide bomber vest as one of their contributions to humanity.