Feb 23 2008
Sahwa
There’s an amazing article in Rolling Stone, the most detailed account of the Sunni Awakening Movement in Iraq that I’ve seen. Rolling Stone‘s articles lately have really been at the top of the batch for me. Mike Taibbi’s political reporting from the campaign trail is great snark with political smarts. His various fights with conservative dickheads on Real Time are similarly amusing. This Nir Rosen piece on the Awakening Movement, “The Myth of the Surge,” will likely find its place in the required reading historians will use to evaluate the Iraq catastrophe some years hence. Some snippets:
Now, in the midst of the surge, the Bush administration has done an about-face. Having lost the civil war, many Sunnis were suddenly desperate to switch sides — and Gen. David Petraeus was eager to oblige. The U.S. has not only added 30,000 more troops in Iraq — it has essentially bribed the opposition, arming the very Sunni militants who only months ago were waging deadly assaults on American forces. To engineer a fragile peace, the U.S. military has created and backed dozens of new Sunni militias, which now operate beyond the control of Iraq’s central government. The Americans call the units by a variety of euphemisms: Iraqi Security Volunteers (ISVs), neighborhood watch groups, Concerned Local Citizens, Critical Infrastructure Security. The militias prefer a simpler and more dramatic name: They call themselves Sahwa, or “the Awakening.”
[...]
The American forces responsible for overseeing “volunteer” militias like Osama’s have no illusions about their loyalty. “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.
This massive buyoff is the “Awakening Movement,” period. Now, I’m not against buying people off to stop with the car bombs and the IEDs and whatnot. I’m the kind of guy who thinks you can solve problems with money (like, say, public education). The rather drastic decline in violence from apocalyptic to merely grossly intolerable levels in Iraq shows that you can. It’s just that money tends to cause new problems, and is not, perhaps, the best way to build relationships of trust. So, if we believe that the “Surge” was directly responsible ofr the decline in violence, we end up with one policy. But that might have nothing to do with what’s actually going on. If we consider the “Awakening Movement” to be some movement constituted by national pride and the desire to end the power struggle, we’re going to end up with a very sorry policy indeed.
There’s enough Sahwa to go around these days.
Money’s another story. So the real question is simple: Will we have a dedicated line in the federal budget paying off – er, funding – the Awakening Movement in perpetuity? Because that seems to be the only way to prevent the Awoken from slipping back into the nightmare.
I guess I can stomach the idea of buying people off with things like finance capital, hospitals, schools, electricity, etc… even a legitimate police force… even soccer fields (remember how Fox news was always talking about the army building soccer fields in Iraq as if that were a sign of goodness? geez-uz)… but buying people off with guns… man, oh, man, that never leads to anything good. What’s truly insidious and down right evil about this “buy off” is that it’s not just money — it’s weapons. We’re basically saying, “we’ll give you more guns if you don’t shoot at us.” How’s that work?
But maybe handing out weapons is better than the initial Iraq policy of the Bush administration — trying to privatize all of the infrastructure as fast as possible… gads, no wonder the place fell apart so fast. (See Naomi Klein’s “Ground Zero” article from Harper’s a couple years ago.)
So your question, “will we have a line in the federal budget…” And my answer is, we don’t have to create a new line in the budget. The U.S. has had a line in the budget for that kind of evil for years… since the late 1940s. Ethiopia. Somalia. Congo. Columbia. Panama. Guatemala. Nicaragua. Venezuela. Chile. Vietnam. … what’s new here?
This isn’t like paying off the Diem regime, or that know-nothing Nguyen Kau Ky. This is like paying off the Viet Cong, which is a different sort of operation altogether, it seems to me.
But yes, it is no new revelation that American foreign policy is twisted bizarre in its various allegiances. Right. That shouldn’t prevent us from exploring what is strange and remarkable about specific cases of twistedness, though, right?
You know way more about Vietnam history than I do. And I see what you mean about recognizing what’s specific to this case. And so, yes, this isn’t like co-opting Vietnamese nationalism under the Diem regime (the third way, did they call it? third something), but neither is it like paying off the Viet Cong, which had a different agenda, organizational structure, and tactics…and were supported by a traditional army (the North Vietnamese Army.)
And I suppose you would also be right too that it is also different than supporting gangster rule in Somalia, because in that case the apparent goal of the U.S. is to create chaos, whereas presumably in Iraq the goal is to stabalize the country long enough so that democratic instutions can begin to work…
So, you’re right — this is really strange, but I also think there are some continuities with U.S. policies elsewhere. In any case, it’s cool that Rolling Stone is talking about it. I never would have expected that.
Ha. I’m a purist. Since there was never any entity called “North Vietnam,” I refuse to use the term “North Vietnamese Army.” It was the People’s Army of Vietnam (PAVN, in military terminology). I do see your point though. The analogy was quick and dirty, and despite your valid objection, I think it holds. What’s really discontinuous here is that American foreign policy is BOTH propping up a regime of dubious independence in the Shia Iraqi government AND propping up its opponents of dubious loyalty in these largely Sunni Awakening Councils. The point is that such cross purposes don’t seem likely to be resolved, since propping up both provides legitimacy to rival claims on the Iraqi state, in the same way supporting both the NLF and the GVN would have been a strange operation indeed.
As for budget lines, the various fundings of outrageous armed factions past are certainly relevant. In this case, however, we literally have a *second* defense budget that comes in the form of arbitrary and endless supplementals. There’s the defense budget on the one hand, and the supplemental for defense on the other, with no clear road of that ever ending. To be fair, I don’t know how that supplemental is set out line by line, nor do I know where all these payoffs are coming from (USAID? State?). But the “permanent supplemental,” always extorted in true gangster fashion with threat after threat, strikes me as far different from the secret NSA lines of previous proppings up. It basically establishes defense as an off budget operation at the relatively sole discretion of the executive, like, forever. I’m not naive. I don’t pretend to believe in the now laughable notion of coequal branches, but does it have to be so blatant? In funding these Awakening Councils the way we are, we basically guarantee the permanent supplemental, and that without objection. It seems like a different thing. Or, to put it another way, what’s different about it is more important than what’s the same about it.