> On Mon, 11 May 2009, SA wrote:
>
>>> We bribed them from the beginning. But before this point they took
>>> the bucks and then shot at us anyway.
>>
>> I'd never heard that before. Where'd you get that?
>
> Really? You never heard about people joining the Iraqi guard by day
> and being part of the insurgency by night? It was notorious in the
> early years. Plus it was why they knew could get around every
> security precaution.
That's not the same thing at all. With the Awakening, we deliberately sought out people we knew had been insurgent leaders and hired and armed them to stop shooting at the troops. We found their sheiks and paid them millions of dollars to put their whole tribes on the payroll for privately administered "public works" while letting them create US-armed private militias, all protected from the Shiite central government. That's a world away from the day jobs in the Iraqi guard some of the insurgents had before the Awakening.
SA