What would happen if one of the Moslem states that has an opposition "state within a state" inside it simply declared that the existence of that feared "extremist" militia/party was an opportunity rather than a threat and began negotiating how to share the duties of government with it?
So Siniora or al-Maliki, just to mention two examples, calls up Nasrallah or al-Sadr and says, "Let's stop the nonsense. You exist. We're rather tied up at the moment with all this national governance business, so we not only accept your existence, we applaud it. All the territory you say you control is yours. Please give us the phone numbers of your local tax collectors so they can have lunch with our national tax collectors and figure out who keeps what. Keep as much as you want, but obviously the more you keep, the more stuff you are responsible for. Here's what we propose...if you keep 10%, you do the garbage collection and hospitals, we do the rest; if you want 30%, you add police; 50% you add education, etc. Just work it out. Oh, yeah, your title is Governor. Congratulations, Mr. Governor. Please send a report in to the national government quarterly. Have a nice day."
3 comments:
sounds way too simple! hey, i like it.
I don't think bush would approve, and therefore, Maliki is not free to do such things.
It does sound ridiculously simple, doesn't it, Annie? A lot of the knots we tie ourselves into result from mental blocks that make us think things are necessarily complicated; on the other hand, sometimes they really are. Who knows? In any case, Dancewater is surely right. Patrons of both client regimes and client insurgencies would have a fit!
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