You know, if John McCain and the rest of the GOP could manage to see past the end of their noses once in awhile, and not be so obsessed with putting profit over everything else -- including human life and decency -- they would realize that without the benefit of foresight success in anything will always be fleeting.
But hell; nobody expected John McCain to see something like this coming. How could he? After all, the surge is working, right? The surge is responsible for all the progress; all the feel-good success stories bursting out like daffodils all over the Iraqi countryside. And, the success of the surge will carry John McCain all the way to the White House... right?
McCain never really knew the difference between Sunnis and Shiites anyway so naturally he failed to see this coming.
A key pillar of the U.S. strategy to pacify Iraq is in danger of collapsing because the Iraqi government is failing to absorb tens of thousands of former Sunni Muslim insurgents who'd joined U.S.-allied militia groups into the country's security forces.
McClatchy has the story that must be keeping the senator from Arizona up at night:
American officials have credited the militias, known as the Sons of Iraq or Awakening councils, with undercutting support for the group al Qaida in Iraq and bringing peace to large swaths of the country, including Anbar province and parts of Baghdad. Under the program, the United States pays each militia member a stipend of about $300 a month and promised that they'd get jobs with the Iraqi government.
But the Iraqi government, which is led by Shiite Muslims, has brought only a relative handful of the more than 100,000 militia members into the security forces. Now officials are making it clear that they don't intend to include most of the rest.
"We cannot stand them, and we detained many of them recently," said one senior Iraqi commander in Baghdad, who spoke only on the condition of anonymity because he wasn't authorized to discuss the issue. "Many of them were part of al Qaida despite the fact that many of them are helping us to fight al Qaida."
Apparently Maliki is considering imposing a November 1, 2008 deadline for all Sunni militia members to give up their weapons who hadn’t as of that date been absorbed either into national security forces or the civilian work force. After that, they’d be arrested.
Some militia members say that such a move would force them into open warfare with the government again.
"If they disband us now, I will tell you that history will show we will go back to zero," said Mullah Shahab al Aafi, a former emir, or leader, of insurgents in Diyala province who's the acting commander of 24,000 Sons of Iraq there, 11,000 of whom are on the U.S. payroll. "I will not give up my weapons. I will never give them up, and I will carry my weapon again. If it is useless to talk to the government, I will be forced to carry my weapons and my pistol."
The conflict over the militias underscores how little has changed in Iraq in the past year despite the drop in violence, which American politicians often attribute to the temporary increase of U.S. troops in Iraq that ended in July.
Both U.S. military officials in Iraq and Republican politicians back in Washington have touted the "sons of Iraq" as the key to the overall success of the surge. But, they’ve always kept quiet about the fact that keeping leftover Ba'ath Party officials and former al-Qaeda members on the payroll was a tenuous arrangement at best. Of course, it didn’t help the situation a bit that U.S. military officials promised the Sunni Awakening groups government jobs when the government is made up of mostly Shi'ites, who’ve not been feeling very reconciliatory lately. Maliki claims the original agreement was for the Iraqi government to employ at most 20 percent of the Sunni militia men and that anything above that number was never feasible.
Prime minister Nouri al-Maliki originally embraced the idea of absorbing militia members into the security forces but he hasn’t followed through – allowing a special committee formed for the massive integration task to completely fall apart months ago. The committee was only recently revived at the behest of U.S. military officials. The process has slowed to a crawl.
"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."
The Iraqi government has allocated $150 million for such training. So far this year, the U.S. military has spent $303 million on Sons of Iraq salaries. American officials declined to be interviewed on the issue without a pledge of anonymity, citing the sensitivity of the subject. But privately they expressed concern.
"If they only take a portion of them it's possible they will return to their insurgent ways," one senior intelligence analyst said, acknowledging that most of the men now called the Sons of Iraq had been insurgents, for al Qaida in Iraq and other groups that considered themselves resistance fighters against Americans.
He called the issue the "long-term threat."
Ya think?
According to the Pentagon, since the beginning of 2007, about 15,000 Sunni militia members have received security jobs, and, after being turned down by the Iraqi army another 2,342 have been approved for jobs with the Iraqi police.
In my book, that leaves (starting out with 103,000 Sunni militia members on the U.S. payroll) 85,658 unhappy campers with weapons. Al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) is but a footnote in Iraqi history now; who do you suppose they’ll turn their American weapons on next?
Abadi, Maliki’s ally, was blunt in calling the militias a problem.
"You've created a problem here," he said. "You can't get rid of a program by shoveling it on the Iraqi government shoulders."
But, nobody could have seen this coming, right Senator?
The "surge" is a fraud...
So, what’s that say about John McCain?
Peace