YugoslavIraq: Michael Ignatieff should be so proud

Via Matt Yglesias, a good-news, bad-news piece from Iraq: The good news is that community groups are springing up all over the place - surely a sign of incipient democracy.*

The bad news is that these community groups are armed militias protecting themselves from government death squads.

As evidence mounts that Shiite police commandos are carrying out secret killings, Sunni Arab neighborhoods across Baghdad have begun forming citizen groups to keep the paramilitary forces out of their areas entirely. In large swaths of western Baghdad, and in at least six majority Sunni areas in its center, young men take turns standing in streets after the 11 p.m. curfew, to send out signals by flashlights and cellphones if strangers approach.

In some cases, the Sunnis have set up barricades and have taken up arms against Shiite-led commando raids into their neighborhoods. In other cases, residents have tipped off Sunni insurgents. Watch groups have been assembled in other mixed areas, including Baquba to the north and Mahmudiya to the south, residents and officials said.

*Actually, Russia saw an actual surge of community- and interest-group formation when the CP fell. Those groups didn't actually amount to anything, a mystery that many PoliSci scholars continue to puzzle over.