Curse of the militias: what Balkanization has done to Iraq, Lebanon, and others.

IRAQ is teetering on the brink of civil war, or so the watching world believes and bemoans. Just one more major atrocity, and it'll be worse than Lebanon in the 1980s, the fragile regime will collapse and the country will break apart, the Turks and the Iranians will move in, and here comes another war in the Middle East.

It's instructive to compare and contrast Lebanon and Iraq. Civil war has always been latent in both countries, exploding regularly into bloodshed--and for very clear reasons. Molded out of outlying provinces of the Ottoman Empire, neither Lebanon nor Iraq has ever had a national identity, or anything that might pass for it. Both were agglomerations of peoples with separate ethnic, communal, and religious identities, altogether a joy to students of ethnography and theology: Maronites and Druze and Arabs in Lebanon, Kurds and Chaldeans and Turkmen and Arabs in Iraq, to name but some. In these Middle East versions of the Balkans, territory and boundaries are flexible concepts, and citizenship nonexistent. The human and social cement for one and all lies in the family, the tribe, the sect, or religious confession, not in statehood or nationhood. Allegiance to those of one's own kind is what counts.

Competition between component groups for the best place in the sun promotes injustice and violence. Shiite Arabs have long stood out as conspicuous losers. A majority in Iraq and probably in Lebanon too, they have been denied the power due their numbers. In the eyes of Sunnis, moreover, Shiites are not true believers but heretics, who therefore deserve a destiny as second-class people. A popular saying expresses the Shiite sense of historic oppression: "Taxes and death are for the Shiites while official jobs are for the Sunnis."

An early sign of the upheavals ahead came in 1860, when the Ottoman Turks proved too weak to prevent communal massacres in their Lebanese provinces. Acting in the spirit of that age, the Western powers intervened to put a stop to this proto-genocide. To govern the country, they then promulgated an Organic Statute. This set up a restricted council of a dozen or so men with authority to speak on behalf of their own kind--a sort of trial-and-error proportional representation. This skillful example of colonial fixing survived until Lebanon acquired its independence after the Second World War. Continuous attempts by every community and minority to manipulate the trial-and-error proportional representation in their favor have subsequently perpetuated Lebanon as an arena of imminent or actual civil war. Statehood and nationhood are still more notional than real.

Occupying Iraq in the First War, the British faced the same communal free-for-all. Still at the expense of the Shiites, they resorted to sleight of hand to put the Sunnis into power, and they then cut and run, just as some want the United States to do today. For decades, extreme violence on the part of the Sunnis kept the lid on civil war while guaranteeing that it would erupt whenever it could. So Iraq too has remained only an approximate nation and state.

Almost exactly a hundred years after the first Western intervention, the United States sent troops into Lebanon, once more to check civil war (with the added incentive to counter what looked at the time like the growing Soviet hold on the Middle East). However, the spirit of the modern age was very different. In the interim, people everywhere had acquired the sovereign right to do as much harm to themselves as they pleased. This time there was nobody willing or able to devise and decree an up-to-date Organic Statute that would have laid the base for a successful state and nation.

Instead the leaders of the various communities and minorities armed militias in order to protect and advance their own kind. The Kataeb or Phalangists, Tigers, Murabitun, the Jumblatt Druze, Amal, the several Palestinian factions and eventually the Israeli army, were a joy to political scientists. For the best part of two decades, these multiple armed forces condemned the country to a hellish merry-go-round of improvised alliances and mutual betrayals that left the definition of the nation and state as fluid as ever. Invading and occupying the country, Syria did not end the inter-communal causes of the fighting but drove them underground to fester.

Among the militias, Amal fought for the Shiites, and it was something of a portent. Areal was the creation of the charismatic imam Musa al-Sadr , born in Iran into a famous family of clerics (and a relation by marriage to Ayatollah Khomeini), but settling in Lebanon. As sectarian fighting spread, he recruited and armed the Shiites to join in the alliances and betrayals all around them, so that the downtrodden became a force equivalent or superior to others. As in a lurid crime novel, one day the imam disappeared without trace in Libya, and his murder has never been solved.

Another Iranian, Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah, began as an Amal ideologue, but he moved on to become leader of Hezbollah, yet another Shiite militia in Lebanon, openly financed, armed, and controlled by the ayatollahs in Tehran. From the outset, Hezbollah has been a byword for terrorism, graduating from kidnapping and beheading of hostages to wiring cars with bombs to kill particular targets and any bystanders caught in the blast. Its innovative specialty has been suicide bombers, and it has popularized the now widespread notion that these bombers kill themselves because they prefer death to life. Hezbollah or its agents killed 243 American Marines in Beirut, and boasts that it has driven Israel back and knows how to drive it back still farther.

More than useful tools, these militias have been part and parcel of the handiwork of Ayatollah Khomeini. For him and his heirs, Islam, and Islam alone, is all that every Muslim needs by way of a state and a nation. Iranian in origin though it is, his brand of Shiite triumphalism affects Muslims everywhere, and the wider world too. Nothing like it has been seen in centuries.

What are Sunnis to do? Saddam Hussein went in for the traditional response, invading Iran, and depicting the subsequent campaigns and battles in terms borrowed from the 7th century when the divide between Sunnis and Shiites first became an issue of doctrine. His defeat and downfall devolves Sunni leadership to Saudi Arabia. The Saudis have no capacity for fighting and probably are unable to put effective military units into the field, and financing preachers and practitioners of their extremist form of Sunni Islam is no substitute.

The terrorist Abu Musab Zarqawi and Saddamite diehards believe themselves to be defending the identity of Sunnis, their community. Zarqawi openly despises Shiites as heretics, and boasts of how many he will kill. The Shiite Badr brigade, or the cleric Moqtada al-Sadr with his Mahdi militia, are indistinguishable in tactics and practice. The demolition of the Golden Mosque in Samarra, the wretched handcuffed and tortured corpses laid out on the mortuary curb, the random suicide bombs, are not so much signs of civil war as inter-communal tests of strength. The brutality, the cruelty, serves the exemplary purpose of showing that whoever stands in the way of the perpetrator and his community can expect no mercy. Atrocities such as the murder of Rafik Hariri and other prominent Lebanese, bombing of churches, attempted kidnappings, provide similar evidence that this violence is instrumental and endemic in the region, not simply the crisis of the hour.

Leaders from all communities in the Middle East have lived their whole lives with these realities; they know from hard experience how to negotiate, and they are able to turn violence on and off in exact degrees to suit their purposes. In the background, largely invisible and therefore unreported, roundtable processes are under way, calculated to fill the political void, and not so very different in character from the roundtables that ended Communism in the Soviet bloc. In Beirut, in the parliament building, leaders of the different communities, Christian, Druze, Shiite and Sunni, pro-Syrian and anti-Syrian, pro-Iran and anti-Iran, are having what former president Amin Gemayel calls a dialogue that "lays the foundation for a new period ... one of independence." Photographs show them smiling and hugging, even though their militias have been conditioned to kill each other.

In Baghdad, the virtual disintegration of the Jaafari government creates a void, and violence fills it as leaders stake out their positions. But all from President Talabani and Ayatollah Sistani downwards are publicly calling for unity. Compromise of communal and sectarian identities is the prerequisite of a nation and a state. Whatever the political, geostrategic, or other dictates and interests originally in play, the American presence in Iraq unexpectedly, and surely temporarily, holds the balance between Shiite triumphalism and Sunni refusal to accept change. Conditions are right for another Organic Statute and more trial-and-error proportional representation, and if those round the table do it for themselves, the spirit of the age will indeed have moved on.

Mr. Pryce-Jones is an NR senior editor. Among his many books is The Closed Circle: An Interpretation of the Arabs.