Enemies Into Allies
February 25th, 2008
By JEB KOOGLER
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But loyalty that can be purchased is by its very nature fickle. Only months ago, members of the Awakening were planting IEDs and ambushing U.S. soldiers. They were snipers and assassins, singing songs in honor of Fallujah and fighting what they viewed as a war of national liberation against the foreign occupiers. These are men the Americans described as terrorists, Saddam loyalists, dead-enders, evildoers, Baathists, insurgents. There is little doubt what will happen when the massive influx of American money stops: Unless the new Iraqi state continues to operate as a vast bribing machine, the insurgent Sunnis who have joined the new militias will likely revert to fighting the ruling Shiites, who still refuse to share power.
“We are essentially supporting a quasi-feudal devolution of authority to armed enclaves, which exist at the expense of central government authority,” says Chas Freeman, who served as ambassador to Saudi Arabia under the first President Bush. “Those we are arming and training are arming and training themselves not to facilitate our objectives but to pursue their own objectives vis-a-vis other Iraqis. It means that the sectarian and ethnic conflicts that are now suppressed are likely to burst out with even greater ferocity in the future.”
This quote is from a recently-published article by Nir Rosen that appears in Rolling Stone this month. It’s a must-read. In the piece, Rosen gets at the crux of the problem with our surge strategy: that by arming reckless and unaccountable groups of Sunni militants — essentially putting them on our payroll — we are creating a beast that will inevitably devolve beyond our control. He argues, quite convincingly, that the only thing keeping the “Concerned Local Citizens” (or “Awakening Councils”) on our side is money.
“The only reason anything works or anybody deals with us is because we give them money,” says a young Army intelligence officer. The 2nd Squadron, 2nd Stryker Cavalry Regiment, which patrols Osama’s territory, is handing out $32 million to Iraqis in the district, including $6 million to build the towering walls that, in the words of one U.S. officer, serve only to “make Iraqis more divided than they already are.” In districts like Dora, the strategy of the surge seems simple: to buy off every Iraqi in sight. All told, the U.S. is now backing more than 600,000 Iraqi men in the security sector — more than half the number Saddam had at the height of his power. With the ISVs in place, the Americans are now arming both sides in the civil war.
These arguments have been made before, but Rosen provides one of the most detailed and compelling accounts of the surge’s flaws.
This entry was posted on Monday, February 25th, 2008 at 5:36 pm and is filed under General David Petraeus, Surge, Al Qaeda, War On Terror, Iraq. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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