How to prevent Iraq violence: bribe them to go away!

[HawkerHurricane]

http://www.commongroundcommonsense.org/forums/index.php?showtopic=83061

Of the many factors contributing to the reduction of U.S. casualties in Iraq, none has been more critical than the decision by the generals in Baghdad to pay more than 80,000 of Iraq's Sunni Arab insurgents a quarter of a billion dollars a year not to shoot at U.S. forces.

It's not the first time that a foreign army in the Middle East has bought off troublesome Arab sheikhs and their cohorts with cash. The British used gold to sedate tribal enemies from the Khyber Pass to the Nile delta while they extracted billions from their colonies. However, it is the first time in American history that buying off the enemy has been presented to the American people as evidence for progress in a war or good generalship.

It's hard to imagine U.S. generals paying the German or Japanese armies not to fight or the Chinese and Vietnamese communists to leave U.S. forces alone. But, then, American military commanders in Baghdad have much more in common with British colonial governors than with the American military leaders of World War II, the Korean War or even the Vietnam War.

======================

[TwilightGardener]

1. Yep. I have been saying this for months--what is being hailed as a

military victory is actually a giant bribery scheme.

[lapfog_1]

2. Actually, it's a strategy that I was pushing since BEFORE the war.

Instead of invading, offer each man/woman/child that travels to a border crossing (designate a few) $10,000 per head (now you could make it $40,000 per person) and have them sign a paper that relinquishes all claims to anything left in Iraq, land, oil, property, whatever... and leave.

I bet more than 15 to 20 million of them would have done this, leaving a population of less than 5 million to deal with (the die hards).

Would have cost us less money. Would have injected a huge amount of cash into the middle east, and not with the top of the social structure but at the bottom, would have left very few people to "fight", and would have secured for us the second largest known oil reserves on the planet...

[Octafish]

3. Cash would serve to reduce hatred for the USA, too.

Great article. Even greater to read ya, HawkerHurricane! Long time no vid!