ATTACKERMAN » Favors For Favors

By: Spencer Ackerman Friday August 22, 2008 10:00 am

Over at Abu Muqawama, my friend Dr. iRack surveys the timetable for U.S. withdrawal and notices a pretty important convergence: June 2009. By that point, the U.S. is supposed to be both out of Iraqi cities and, say the Doctor’s sources, relinquished the Sons of Iraq program — much hated by the Shiite government — over to the Iraqis. What’s that mean? Doctor:

This means the Maliki government will be free to employ them if they so desire or, more likely, fire them, detain them, or use all that biometric and biographical information we’ve collected to do whatever else they see fit with them. Given the fact that Maliki and his allies hate these guys and, according to a recent interview with General Petraeus, the Iraqi government is purposefully slowing the integration process down, it is unlikely that Maliki and his buddies will be generous once they are in complete control of the program. And if recent behavior in Diyala and the newly reported crack down on SoIs in Abu Ghraib are any indication, things could get ugly.

Again, this all goes back to the "assertiveness" of Maliki. If what Dr. iRack writes is borne out, Maliki believes he really can take on all comers and win. The Sons of Iraq are not going to take their extirpation lying down.

Crossposted to The Streak.

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2 Responses to “Favors For Favors”

Kilo August 22nd, 2008 at 12:08 pm

I think I’ve solved the problem of what to do with the SoI. This convergence of US-out and SoI-NFI provides a unique opportunity for spectacular bastardry.

So the SoI were promised integration into the ISF and the US needs to draw as many troops out of Iraq while still providing support to the ISF, an obvious component of which will be training.

As proposed all over the place, the US can get out of Iraq and still provide certain kinds of support from neighbouring countries like Kuwait, as they already have. So the solution would be that the US sets up their ISF training camps there, the SoI are enrolled en-masse, then Iraq cancells their passports.

As an added bonus, oil-rich Kuwait now has 100,000 professionally trained, pissed off insurgents on it’s hands. It’s like the circle of life except with oil and AKs.

This would provide a reason for the US to park some serious hardware on that same peninsula and it’s oil access routes with scenic views of Iran for some time to come. Control over the Kuwait border would allow the US to turn on the flow of insurgents into Iraq when the country should need to rethink any of it’s policies. Like whether they can match Kuwait’s oil output which they’ve increased to convince the US to stick around to help deal with those insurgents.

Awesome.