IRAQ: Guns for money

Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri Maliki's hopes of forcing Shiite militiamen to hand in their weapons has fallen flat, so he has extended a disarmament deadline and sweetened the deal by offering money in exchange for guns.

A spokesman for the government's Interior Ministry, Abdul Kareem Khalaf, acknowledged today that not a single weapon had been turned in since Maliki ordered the disarmament Wednesday and gave fighters a three-day deadline. The call came as Shiite Muslim militias battled Iraqi security forces in the aftermath of Maliki's crackdown on militiamen. The offensive was launched Tuesday in the southern city of Basra and has since spread to Shiite strongholds across Iraq.

Khalaf said Maliki had extended the deadline until April 8 and that a "financial reward" awaits militiamen who comply. There's no word on how much this reward could be. Maliki has said fighters who disarm must also sign a pledge to refrain from future militia activities and follow Iraqi law.

If it sounds familiar, that's because this is similar to the model in use by U.S. forces as they work to keep former insurgents from resuming anti-U.S. activities. That program, launched in late 2006, has been aimed mainly at Sunni Muslims who once supported the insurgency but who, for a variety of reasons, have opted out of the fight.

Now, some 80,000 of them receive about $10 per day from the United States military in exchange for manning checkpoints in their neighborhoods and bolstering security. Before earning their positions in the so-called Sons of Iraq program, they had to go through background checks and sign pledges of loyalty to the Iraqi government.

That system has its own problems, as the Times reported in a recent story that outlined the potential pitfalls of paying people not to shoot you. But getting the Sunnis to agree to the deal was not as difficult as it could be to get Shiites to accept a guns-for-money plan. As analysts such as Stephen Biddle of the Council on Foreign Relations has noted, the Sunnis are vastly outnumbered in Iraq. Unlike the one-time Sunni fighters who switched loyalties, Shiite militiamen have a far better chance of coming out on top in the power struggles raging across Iraq.

"The real tough nuts are the Shiite militias," Biddle said in an interview with the Times last year, as he discussed the chances of success of President George W. Bush's plan of using additional American troops to pacify Iraq. The Sunnis, he explained, saw themselves as "potential losers" in any Iraqi conflict, so they had plenty to gain by switching sides.

"The big hurdles to overcome are persuading the people who think they're going to win a civil war to settle for less," he said.

That's the headache facing Maliki. Sadr militiamen and loyalists say they have no intention of stopping their resistance to the current offensive. Some warn it will make them more determined to fight.

"It is up to Maliki whether there will be detente," said Abu Ali, a Mahdi Army member who took part in a large march in Baghdad's Sadr City neighborhood to protest the situation. He said violence would soar if Maliki did not call off his troops. "We will be more determined. Enough humiliation!"

Maliki, meanwhile, has turned to outside help in Basra. U.S. forces killed three "criminal enemy militia" members during an air strike on Thursday night, the U.S. military said. It was not immediately clear if the Navy warplane used in the strike dropped bombs or strafed the mortar-launching position with cannon fire.

Initially, a British military spokesman, Maj. Tom Holloway, said two U.S. bombs were dropped. Holloway said the Iraqis requested air support and that the targets happened to be in the radar of American jets flying overhead. Later, he said he was mistaken and that cannon fire was used. A U.S. statement confirmed the American action but not the type of weapon fired.

Holloway said U.S. and British jets have been flying over the city 24 hours a day since Tuesday.

--Tina Susman in Baghdad

Photo: U.S.-backed guards, or Sons of Iraq, attend a post near a mosque in Baghdad. In quieter areas of Iraq, the U.S. is trying to move guards into nonmilitary jobs. Credit: Sabah Arar / AFP / Getty Images

Comments

[Willam Keller]

One still wonders, as the news reports only the actions of the street gangs of all sides, from where is the direction coming? Leaders of Dawa? How are the Shiite negotiations progressing? Who are the negotiators? Is the US engaged in a pre-election Yalta negotiation on behalf of the Republican Party? Old names like al-Jaafari, Allawi, Chalabi? Baathist on the run, what are they doing? Authoritarians from the Gulf involved? What are the Israelis, Kurds and Iranians demanding?

[Professor Stephen O'Harrow]

Here is a basic proposition: ideological assumptions reduce the complexities of a particular slice of reality, provide simplifying clarity and suggest appropriate ways of dealing with that reality.
NeoConservative ideology and a belief in American exceptionalism, leavened with views, some religious and some cultural, about the rightful role of Israel, provided American policy-makers the "keys" to the "realities" of the Middle East. It allowed men like George W. Bush and Dick Cheney to look at Iraq and believe they understood what they observed, bringing order, at least in their own minds, to complexities that were otherwise undecipherable to them.
Unfortunately for us, to say nothing of the Iraqis, most of their ideological scaffolding rested on sand as shifting as the deserts of Arabia. What they thought they saw and knew bore little relation to the actual conditions on the ground and their controlling ideology provided a catastrophic guide to action.
Our leaders have apparently learned nothing from their mistakes. Senator McCain is now backing the "surge" in Iraq based on this same set of mistaken assumptions we have seen for the last eight years. At a town hall meeting in Derry, New Hampshire, he is quoted as saying the United States military could stay in Iraq for "maybe a hundred years" and that "would be fine with me."
It is clear to anyone who reads the news reporting from the field that, even if it were three times bigger and even if it were working as well militarily as the Bush White House and Senator McCain claim, the surge cannot possibly succeed in its stated political objective.
Why? Because the stated object of the surge is to allow the Maliki Shi'a government in Baghdad to mend its ways, to reach out to Sunnis and Kurds, and to build up its forces to the point where it can train an even-handed national army, share the oil revenues, build a united, democratic, inclusive, and peaceful Iraq and the US can withdraw victorious.
But the Maliki government has absolutely no capacity or intention of accomplishing any of the above goals, not a single one. The Maliki government is unashamedly the government of the Shi'a majority and the Shi'a majority alone. In reality, Maliki's most sympathetic ties are not with the United States but with the Shi'a government of Iran Three weeks ago, American television news audiences watched as Maliki publicly embraced Ahmadinejad.
And from the native-born Iraqi point of view, the insurgency has always been about Sunni economic and social communal self-interest and fear of Shi'a revenge, not about Islam or ideology or so-called Iraqi nationalism. For this reason, militarily speaking, the actual reasons for the perceived lull in violence have little to do with the surge. The two real reasons for the fall in violence are: 1. the bribing of the Sunni sheiks to fight against "Al Qaeda in Iraq" and 2. the temporary truce called by Muqtada al-Sadr, leader of the Mehdi Army, the largest and best armed of the Shi'a militias.
So surge or no surge, there is a zero long-term prospect for progress on the all basic objectives of the surge, no matter whether it succeeds or doesn't succeed in suppressing violence. Our so-called allies, the Maliki government, and its actual allies, the Shi'a militias and the ayatollahs in Teheran, are simply biding their time - they live in the MIddle East and we don't, so they can wait as long as they need to and waiting out the surge is precisely what they are doing right now.
Unless Senator McCain can both explain how we can have any confidence that the Maliki regime will start delievering on promises that they have consistently broken since the day they were put in power, the American voters will see the surge for what it really is: a waste of American lives and treasure.

[Ramon Carrion]

I just read that our air force has bombed a suspected militant occupied building and killed perhaps 16 "enemy" fighters. Enemy of whom one might ask. We have no business to interfere in what is essentially a civil war between various factions within Iraq. Talk about hubris. We had our own revolution in 1775. It was bloody and cruel and the colonial insurgents were considered as terrorists. We had our own civil war. That was our business as well. Go down the list of revolutions since our own; France, Russia, Ireland, etc., just to name a few. The Bush doctrine of war in seek of a rationale has seemlessly metamorphosed into a routine assumption that we have a right and a duty to dictate to the people of Iraq who their government can be. History, I am afraid, will not let us go it away with it. Our country seems to have lost its philosophical direction and now merely exercises its military might without reflection -- and without principle.
Ramon Carrion

[Frank Johnson]

Three weeks before we invaded Iraq I wrote a letter to President Bush warning him what would happen if we did this.
He never sent me a response.
It didn't matter to me because get my response in the newspaper EVERY DAY.
And if things have not gotten better in 5 years and 4000 lives later, when can we expect results? 10, 20 30 years? Wake up young people. Your IPODs are smarter than you, and this is why George (convicted of drunk driving) Bush and Dick (raking in the Halliburton war profits) Cheney are sitting in their chairs waving their flags and laughing at you. Put down your cell phones and listen, young people.
Our President had a personal vendetta against the leader of Iraq and our Vice President had tons of Halliburton stock and they are both using YOU to fulfill their plan in the name of patriotism.(Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction according to the CIA, George Tenant and everybody on earth except President Bush). Young people, ask your parents why, why was Halliburton the only company allowed to bid on the Iraq contracts? Connect the dots, young people. That’s why God gave you a brain.
I call on the young people of this country, who have the power in their hands to stop this thing, to act. If you STOPPED joining the military, people in power will have 2 choices. 1. Get out of Iraq. 2. Start a draft.(which would finish them off politically) No which do you think they will choose?
Young people, when you die and go to heaven, the first two things you will learn is 1. George Bush is not God. In fact, he is a long way from it. 2. Red, White, and Blue are just 3 colors. Nothing more guys. Sorry.
Young people. I am only alive today because I chose not to go to Vietnam in 1971. Had I gone and died there what would I have accomplished? The answer is absolutely nothing, young people. Jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge would have had more purpose.
Vietnam now gets more American tourists than most Asian countries. Where is the loyalty of the American people to those 50,000 brave men and women who died there? Fact is young people, there is none.
And what about the tens of thousands of Veterans who ended up homeless on the streets of America? Why are they there and why does nobody care about them after they gave their lives for this country? Do you think they will treat you any better when you end up out there? I once saw a woman in a BMW hit and kill a homeless Vet in the street and she was NEVER EVEN CITED. She was later seen laughing about it in public. Want this to be you?
Dare…….Dare young people, as I did back in 1971, to see through the deception of one man and his selfish agenda hiding behind the flag of a great nation, and those fools who follow him.

[DE Teodoru]

No one who knew anything about Iraq did not know that
if the US takes sides in the Badr-Mahdi conflict, the
truce with Sadr and the Sunnis would be off. And no
one had any doubt that if the US supports Badr against
Mahdi, the Sunnis in Anbar could well also turn on the
US presence. Nothing could be more tragic. For the
"Awakening" relationship between Anbar and the US
military was a replay of the CAP/MAT Marines in South
Vietnam's I Corps and Army in IV Corps localization of
the US-Vietnam villages union against the North
Vietnamese forces. The bonds were made at boots level.
Individual soldiers learned to bond with Sunnis. Then,
finally after five years, the US Command realized that
if you pay Iraqis they will work and decided to salary
them for keeping the peace. So, it would seem, the
needed "awakening" is ours, not that of the Anbar
Iraqis.

But all that is at risk as Maliki's name goes on a
Bush directed effort to defeat Sadr on behalf of
Hakim. To most Iraqis, the attack on Mahdi is support
for Iran's takeover of Iraq's South. Our planes are
killing Iraqis for Iran, many say, just as the 2007
nuclear NIE announced an end to US enmity to Iran.

WE really should not waste the bloody lessons learned
by our foot soldiers at boot level about doing things
the Iraqi way in Anbar. But if we are to repeat our
storm trooper tactics of Fallujah in Basra, then maybe
we should get out now before we come to be remembered
as the British airpower is remembered in Iraq from the
1930s.

Daniel E. Teodoru

[Michael E. Piston]

I was quite skeptical when a read about a year ago of a Sunni insurgent who stated that if the U.S. opposed Iran he would join the U.S. Well, turns out that his comments were somewhat prophetic. The U.S., after pursuing a defacto alliance with Iran for the early years of the war, has now turned against it and the Sunnis are siding with the U.S. The crackdown on the Shia militia are something the Sunnis have been demanding for years. Ironically though, the crackdown is led by the Iranian back Dawa and SCIRI parties against the Iraqi nationalist Mehdi Army. Every time one turns around, Iraq just gets wierder and wierder.

[David M]

The Thunder Run has linked to this post in the blog post From the Front: 03/28/2008 News and Personal dispatches from the front lines.

http://thunderrun.blogspot.com/2008/03/from-front-03282008.html