IRAQ: What money can buy, and can’t
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Baghdad correspondent Alexandra Zavis has a front-page story in today’s Los Angeles Times about one of the most successful programs ever devised by the U.S. military to quell violence in Iraq, and the potential consequences of what would happen if it comes to an end:
After five years of trial and error, the strategy of recruiting tribesmen to help defend their neighborhoods against Islamic extremists has proved one of the most effective weapons in the U.S. counterinsurgency arsenal. But restoring a measure of calm to what were some of the most violent places in Iraq has in turn presented the U.S. military with one of its biggest headaches: what to do with the more than 80,000 armed men whose loyalty has been bought with a paycheck that cannot go on forever.
The tribesmen are paid $10 a day. If you count administrative costs, equipment like flak jackets and weapons, the so-called Concerned Local Citizens strategy could easily cost about $500 million a year.
[Update, 11:45 PST: I’m told by Zavis that the U.S. military doesn’t equip CLCs with weapons or flak jackets.]
Meanwhile, Tony Perry’s dispatch about reconstruction in the war-scarred city of Fallouja shows what cash and security can do to improve the lives of Iraqis people in a place once synonymous with death and destruction:
Restaurants, bakeries, photo shops, tire stores, Internet cafes, a body-building studio and other businesses line the avenues and side streets. BMWs share lanes with donkey carts on congested thoroughfares.... Police are on the streets. A new hospital is set to open this spring, funded by the U.S. and the Iraqis. Marines have removed many of the barriers and concertina wire that gave the city what one officer called the ‘Berlin 1945 look.’ There have been soccer tournaments and art contests. And there are plans for a soft-drink bottling plant.
Money calmed the insurgency and rebuilt Fallouja. But what would it take to keep the non-U.S. forces in Iraq?
U.S. Sen. John McCain found himself having to curry favor with the United Kingdom and Prime Minister Gordon Brown, Washington’s ever-more junior partner in the dwindling coalition of the willing.
As Times’ London Bureau Chief Kim Murphy reports, the presumptive Republican presidential candidate withheld his earlier criticism of the Brits for pulling troops out of southern Iraq:
‘I fully appreciate that British public opinion has been frustrated by sometimes a lack of progress in both areas,’ [McCain] said, referring to Iraq and Afghanistan. ‘But all I can do is express my gratitude to the British government and people, especially the brave young people who are serving.’
McCain was visiting London as part of a congressional delegation. They were on the tail end of a fact-finding mission that included visits to Iraq and Israel. But money was also on McCain’s mind. He held a fund-raiser for his presidential campaign while visiting London.
— Borzou Daragahi in Beirut