Market Indicators for Violence

Call it violence futures. Or leading indicators of what Iraqis themselves expect is coming.

* “I bought this for $450 last year,” he said of the rifle. “Now it costs $650. The prices keep going up.”
* .....Glock and Walther 9-millimeter pistols, and pristine, unused Kalashnikovs from post-Soviet Eastern European countries. These are three of the principal types of the 370,000 weapons purchased by the United States for Iraq’s security forces, a program that was criticized by a special inspector general this fall for, among other things, failing to properly account for the arms.

(Don't forget that the leadership of the 109th Congress wanted to get rid of the special IG.)

The partition option may not be on the table for American policymakers who cling to the notion that we can substantially effect what is coming in Iraq, but the bloody partitioning of Iraq is taking place right now. Right now, its American purchased weapons. If Maliki's government falls, the Iraq Security Forces become no more than unregulated militias - unless the incresingly divided Iraqis come up with another Sunni-Shia coalition government (care to place a bet on that proposition?) And as our Founding Fathers said, a well-regulated militia is necessary for the governing of a state. We are simply training and arming future militias.