Hush Money

The Bush administration and hawkish supporters of indefinite continued involvement in the Iraq conflict [eg. John McCain]have been touting the drop in violence in Iraq as evidence of “success” of the “Surge” strategy. The Bush administration pushed through a deployment of 30,000 additional US troops with the goal of pacification. The media and PR spin was that a massive show of force would send the insurgents packing or force them to put down their arms and embrace the new Iraq regime.

Whether that media representation was self-deluded or a product of fraudulent propaganda, the facts coming to the fore now show the real situation in Iraq to be much different. Less publicity was given to another program implemented by the US government, at the same time as the Surge, that involved paying Sunni militia members a stipend of approximately $300 per month to resist the insurgency.

The insurgent problem itself was created, or greatly increased, by a misguided decision by the Coalition Provisional Authority [read this as Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld] to disband the existing Iraqi security forces that were predominantly Sunni and force hundreds of thousands of young Iraqi men into unemployment and unemployability in the new regime. This action fueled anti-US resentment among former trained soldiers as well as desperation to feed their families, and caused a swelling in the ranks of the insurgency. The combination of being unemployed and the natural inclination toward allegiance to local tribal and religious leaders created a ready pool of talent to be exploited by anti-US and anti-Shiite organizations and militias. The nearly complete breakdown of civil law also provided a logical role for these former soldiers and security force members to act as local community defense teams.

Some of these displaced soldiers, who had been associated or allied with Al Qaida or the insurgency [these are different entities despite Bush administration hype], accepted pay from the US to participate in these anti-insurgent militias. For many, it simply meant being paid to stay home and stop fighting or agitating – “hush money.” The US taxpayers have footed the bill for this “hush money” program, to the tune of more than $300 million over a period of less than two years. Critics of the program complained that making “bribes” to local Sheiks and tribal leaders and militia members to pacify them would backfire when the payments ended. The Bush administration public response was a broad promise that these militia would be given jobs in the Iraq security forces in the future. However, the actual closed door deal with Prime Minister Nouri Al Maliki of the Shiite led Iraqi government contemplated actually hiring only about 20%of these Sunni militiamen. Now the ball of yarn is starting to unravel, with potentially devastating consequences.

The false promise by the Bush administration has been publicly exposed as the Iraqi government now refuses to employ more than a handful of these Sunni militia. Confirming that the Iraqi government never promised to employ all of the Sunnis in the national security forces, and that doing so is neither economically nor politically palatable, a current member of the Prime Minister's party stated:

"All the Americans are doing is paying them just to be quiet," said Haider al Abadi, a leading member of Maliki's Dawa political party and the head of the economic and investment committee in the parliament. The Iraqi government, he said, can't "justify paying monthly salaries to people on the grounds that they are ex-insurgents."

In response to a suggestion that the current Shiite led government forces would set a deadline for the unemployed militias to turn in their weapons or be subject to arrest, a Sunni tribal leader of one such militia group with more than 24,000 members declared that he would NEVER turn over the weapons. This leader of one of the “Sons of Iraq” militias in the crucial Diyala Province stated that, if unable to deal with the government, his group would again take up those weapons against the Maliki government. Consider that about 11,000 of his members had been on the US payroll, and that his group alone represented a number nearly equal to the size of the “Surge” US deployment forces. One need not be a genius to conclude that a major force behind the reduction in violence was this program of hush money rather than being primarily based upon the US show of force.

Now that the bribery money is drying up and the false promise of future employment has been exposed, the prior conditions that fueled the insurgency return. Reliable reports on the ground have been telling us for years that Al Qaida has been only a relatively small fraction of the insurgent problem, despite Bush administration propaganda. The recent reports that many Al Qaida leaders are moving to Afghanistan is significant for Afghanistan, but unlikely to mean any significant drop in the risk of violence in Iraq. The real problem has been a low-to-moderate grade civil war between tribal and religious factions vying for control and economic power. That smoldering problem seems ready to break into open conflagration again in the near future unless some diplomatic and economic response to the teeming mass of unemployed and disenfranchised Sunni militia members comes forward.

Since diplomacy is a primary weakness of the Bush administration, and intransigence is the strongest characteristic of the current Shiite led Iraqi government, the picture is indeed bleak.