"Stay Behind" strategies in Iraq

[Ken Brown]

Tim May wrote:

> 1. Iraq has been a welfare state for essentially its entire lifetime.
>  From the 1920s to the 1960s, a typical backwater royalist welfare
> state. Since the 1960s, a socialist/central planning/fascist state.

In some districts but not all. Apparently - I'm no expert & just
relaying info from a friend who at least has the advantage of being able
to speak Arabic and who keeps up with Arab news media - quite large
parts of the agricultural sector are all but feudal. Large farms or
whole villages or counties are organised on tribal or clan lines,
sometimes resembling the caste systems of India, with landowners coming
from one group  (usually in recent years in cahoots with the Ba'athists
of course) and other clans being landless peasants who get work as
labourers. 

If true that explains both the surprising extent of weaponry in private
hands in the Shi'ite areas - presumably it was the landlords who had the
guns - and also the dire poverty and hunger of so many people in what is
(unlike the Baghdad region) a fertile and productive agricultural area.