What about the looting, the mayhem, and the fires? It’s clearly a bad situation. And these things get to a tipping point where they can go from looting and mayhem to something far 
deeper and darker which is very hard to put a stop to. Having said all this, though, I think we shouldn’t be too quick to ask why the invasion force didn’t have some sort of constabulary or plan in place to stop this. If it’s still like this in a week, it’ll be a good question to ask. But I think it is virtually inevitable that you’re going to have some period of rupture — a window of time when there’s an utter vacuum of authority — when a government like this falls under military assault.
One reason is historical, another is operational. The first is just, as we’ve noted before, the steel beam under compression finally snapping. It’s a judgment call; but to some degree it’s probably better to ride this tumult in the short-term rather than squelch it. There’s a lot of rage and clamor to be let off and better not to turn too much of it toward US soldiers trying to keep everyone in check.
The more important issue, however, seems operational.
One moment you’re in very active battle for a city. The last thing you want is thirty-thousand lightly-armed or unarmed policemen and American aid facilitators hanging around to get shot, or taken hostage or just get in way. The next moment you’re not at war and you’ve got thousands of US soldiers and marines who are — for a host of reasons — in no position to police anything but the most egregious sorts of crimes. Add to this, of course, the fact that even that dividing line isn’t so clear. We have mainly a liberated/conquered city where large-scale hostilities are at an end and the old regime is gone. But we still have irregulars or foreign fighters or holdouts shooting off occasional shots. And that makes it hard to send anything but heavily armed folks out into the field.
Add to this one final complexity. Part of the problem is that you’re dealing with a former regime that was so shot through with state-terror that it’s hard to see how many people who ever wielded “hard” authority under the old regime are going to want to show their heads again even in an interim capacity. The Army is putting out the call for police and firefighters and the people who ran the phones and water and electricity to come back to work. In the latter cases, that’ll probably work. But what about the police? I’m not sure there were people in Iraq who would fit our rather benign definition of “police.” I’m sure there were low-level folks in the security apparatus who were decent people compromised by a bad system. But I can imagine those folks wouldn’t want to show their faces just now. And do we want them keeping order for us?
It’s a tough situation, and an ugly one that we’ve got to get a handle on. Morally and under international law, we’re responsible for restoring order when it was our tanks that smashed the old, albeit hideous, order. (Isn’t this a case of the troop strength, again, being too small? Yes, I suspect so, to a degree. But even if there were a lot more troops immediately at the ready, I think you’d still have an interval of chaos like this since the sort of troops you use to fight your way in to the city just aren’t equipped for policing duties. We need to see how it looks in a week or two.) The real danger over the long-term is the sort of deeper inter-communal blood-letting which reared its head yesterday in Najaf — of which we’ll say more later. But I think we should recognize that in the short-run this sort of ugliness may have been close to unavoidable.
