{"id":1610,"date":"2008-02-11T10:10:31","date_gmt":"2008-02-11T18:10:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp\/2008\/02\/our_subprime_war\/"},"modified":"2008-02-11T10:10:31","modified_gmt":"2008-02-11T18:10:31","slug":"our_subprime_war","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/2008\/02\/our_subprime_war.html","title":{"rendered":"Our Subprime War"},"content":{"rendered":"

Whenever I read or hear about the success of the surge,<\/i> I substitute the phrase bribes to the tribes.<\/i> Those four little words make a world of difference, and they go back a long way — viz. “Protection Payments” made to Tribes in Ottoman Gaza (1519-1582)<\/strong><\/font><\/a> — but you don’t see them often enough in news accounts of the Iraq war.
\nNor do you hear the President With His Head Up His Ass<\/strong><\/font><\/a> boasting about our bribes to the tribes. He brags instead, as he did the other day<\/strong><\/font><\/a>, about “the surge of forces.” Even a lengthy report<\/strong><\/font><\/a> that broke the news of the new Army operations manual on counterinsurgency, revised after the “hard-won lessons” of Afghanistan and Iraq, fails to mention bribery. It speaks instead about the importance of street patrols.
\n<\/a>Maybe when the revised operations manual is made public later this month, we’ll see the inclusion of a new doctrinal tactic to formalize what has already happened: “Bring lotsa cash to buy off the enemy, especially in ten-million-dollar bricks.”
\n(Hmmm, thanks to Fred Kaplan at Slate<\/strong><\/font><\/a>, I see that the manual has already been posted<\/strong><\/font><\/a> in a huge pdf file by Secrecy News<\/strong><\/font><\/a>. Downloading the 314-page manual– it’s 28 MB — is guaranteed to freeze your browser for a while. But I managed, and a quick glance through the pages indicates that bribing insurgents is not mentioned anywhere.)
\nA weapons analyst I know can’t understand why “the press lays off all this stuff. It scrubs everything clean, sanitizes it, and presents it in the best possible light. If this were a Democratic president overseeing strategy, he would be ripped apart. We have a real<\/i> scandal. It’s not Whitewater. It’s something at the highest level of national security.”
\nIn fairness, I have to point out that it’s not as if bribes to the tribes have gone unnoticed. Not too long ago, the BBC reported<\/strong><\/font><\/a>, as did others, that the payoffs have made al-Qaeda’s Ayman al-Zawahiri very unhappy. (Scroll way down.) And they were<\/i> mentioned in passing only yesterday by NYT reporter Alissa J. Rubin. She noted<\/strong><\/font><\/a> that groups paid by the American military “to fight Islamic extremists” in Iraq’s Anbar Province “have mostly seemed to be cooperating,” although recently “their behavior has been [um] problematic.”
\nMeaning, of course, that bribes notwithstanding they’d rather put their own interests ahead of ours and others’. Now ain’t that a surprise.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Whenever I read or hear about the success of the surge, I substitute the phrase bribes to the tribes. Those four little words make a world of difference, and they go back a long way — viz. President With His Head Up His Ass boasting about our bribes to the tribes. He brags instead, lengthy […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-1610","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-main","7":"entry"},"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pbvgEs-pY","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1610","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1610"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1610\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1610"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1610"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1610"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}