Iraq From an Armored BMW: Where U.S. 'Reconstruction' Funds Are Really Going

By Dahr Jamail, Tomdispatch.com. Posted February 14, 2009.

The program was soon hailed as a success, and the groups were dubbed anything from The Awakening, to Sons of Iraq (al-Sahwa), or as the U.S. military preferred for a time, Concerned Local Citizens. Whatever the name, most of their members were former resistance fighters; many were also former members of Saddam Hussein's Baath Party; and significant numbers were -- and, of course, remain -- both.

There was an even deeper history to the path the Americans finally chose in order to tame the insurgency and the home-grown al-Qaeda-in-Iraq (AQI) groups that had spun off from it. In an interview with David Enders and Richard Rowley, colleagues of mine, in the summer of 2007, Sheikh Aifan laid this out quite clearly: "Saddam Hussein supported some tribes and some sheiks. Some of those sheiks, he used their power in their areas. The first support came by money. He supported them by big projects, by money, and he made them very rich. So you see, they can deal with anyone in Iraq with money. The Americans, they made the same plan with all the sheiks."

The main goal of the Americans was never the reconstruction of devastated al-Anbar Province. That was just the label given to a project whose objective -- from the U.S. point of view -- was to save American lives and to tamp down violence in Iraq before the U.S. presidential election of 2008.

Today, leading sheiks like Aifan will tell you that they are in "the construction business." That's a polite phrase for what they're doing, and the rubric under which a lot of the payouts take place (however modest actual reconstruction work might be). Think of it this way: Every dealer needs a front man. The U.S. bought the sheiks off and it was to their immediate advantage to be bought off. They regained a kind of power that had been seeping away, while all the money and arms allowed them to put real muscle into recruiting people in the tribes they controlled and into building the Awakening Movement.

The reasons -- and they are indeed plural -- why the tribal leaders were so willing to collaborate with the occupiers of their country are, at least in retrospect, relatively clear. Those in al-Anbar who had once supported, and had been supported by, Saddam Hussein, and then had initially supported the resistance became far keener to work with occupation forces as they saw their power eroded by al-Qaeda-in-Iraq.

AQI proved a threat to the sheiks, many of whom had initially worked directly with it, when it began to try to embed its own fierce, extremist Sunni ideology in the region -- and perhaps even more significantly, when it began to infringe on the cross-border smuggling trade that had kept many tribal sheiks rich. As AQI grew larger and threatened their financial and power bases, they had little choice but to throw in their lot with the Americans.

As a result, these men obtained backing for their private militias, renamed Awakening groups, and in addition, signed "construction" contracts with the Americans who put millions of dollars in their pockets, even if not always into actual construction sites. As early as April 2006, the Rand Corporation released a report, "The Anbar Awakening," identifying America's potential new allies as a group of sheiks who used to control smuggling rings and organized crime in the area.

One striking example was Sheik Abdul Sattar Abu Risha, who founded the first Awakening groups in al-Anbar and later led the entire movement until he was assassinated in 2007, shortly after he met with President Bush. It was well known in the region that Abu Risha was primarily a smuggler defending his business operations by joining the Americans.

Not surprisingly, given the lucrative nature of the cooperative relationship that developed, whenever an Awakening group sheik is assassinated, another is always there to take his place. Abu Risha was, in fact, promptly replaced as "president" of the Anbar Awakening by his brother Sheik Ahmad Abu Risha, also now in the "construction business."

Dreaming of the New Dubai

When George W. Bush visited Iraq in September 2007, my host on my tour of Fallujah, Sheik Aifan, was delighted to meet him. Bush, he claimed, was "very smart and a brother." During the summer of 2008, he would meet Barack Obama as well. When asked what he thought of Obama, he told Richard Rowley, "U.S. foreign policy tends not to change with a new president." A photo of him with Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki is proudly displayed, among many others, at his home in Fallujah.

See more stories tagged with: iraq, iraq war, iraq occupation, surge, sunnis, shiites, baghdad, us military, fallujah, al-anbar, sons of iraq, the awakening, al-qaeda in iraq, sheik aifan, sheik abdul sattar abu ri

Dahr Jamail, an independent journalist, has been covering the Middle East for more than five years and is the author of Beyond the Green Zone: Dispatches from an Unembedded Journalist in Occupied Iraq. He reports for Inter Press Service and is a regular contributor to TomDispatch. He has also published in Le Monde Diplomatique, the Independent, the Guardian, the Sunday Herald of Scotland, the Nation, and Foreign Policy in Focus, among others. To visit his website, click here.

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