No, No, No.

We are not talking here about Harvard political scientist Samuel Huntington’s controversial thesis on the Clash of Civilizations.

We are talking about Huntington’s earlier work, Political Order in Changing Societies (Yale University Press, 1968).

In that now forgotten classic, Huntington famously argued in the opening sentence:

The most important political distinction among countries concerns not their form of government but their degree of government.

As Iraq collapses into complete chaos, it’s worthwhile to reexamine Huntington’s 42-year-old argument (originally outlined in an essay Political Order and Political Decay in the academic journal World Politics in 1965).

Huntington framed his argument on the importance of order in context of rising violence in modernizing countries across the world. In perhaps the best sentence by a contemporary political thinker, Huntington wrote:

Men may, of course, have order without liberty, but they cannot have liberty without order.

Fast forward to Iraq.

Saddam Hussein was a monster, the likes of whom have seldom walked the face of this planet. Some 200,000 people died or disappeared during his decades-long rule in addition to the several hundred thousand who perished in the Iraq-Iran war and the first Persian Gulf War.

But Saddam and his Baath Party were also a bulwark against terrorists in Iraq and ensured order and stability in the country, mostly through repressive measures.

In the aftermath of Saddam’s ouster, the institutional vacuum has produced Continue Reading…