The Bu$h malAdministration has produced a lot of propaganda recently about the Anbar Awakening. Apparently, the surge demanded by Generalissimo Field Marshal Fred Kagan has worked superbly is solving all our military problems in Iraq, if you listen to the Kagan Klan, or any other never-right media source.

(Glenn Greenwald, a vital source of sanity and keen critic of wingers and their fascistic tendencies had some interesting observations on the inner machinations of the United Sates Kagan Korporation and its linkage to all the wrong people here. Regrettably, he didn’t say much at all about the Korporation’s deep connections to the Likud Party.)

The Bu$hies have spent untold millions of our dollars buying weapons under questionable circumstances and distributing them to Sunni insurgents, as well as additional millions buying them off in order to quiet them down. Since the US Army, under Gen David Petraeus’ allegedly capable administration never bothered to actually count the rifles and pistols they bought, nor bothered to write down the serial numbers, there is some question about just where they all went. (The Yorkshire Ranter has a suggestion about where some of these missing rifles went. Surprise! They never got to Iraq.)

General Petraeus’ lame excuse that it was more important to get the weapons into the field than to account for them is laughable. (“We were kicking them out of helicopters.”)

He [Petraeus] described one case in which U.S. forces flew into the war zone of Najaf at night, their helicopters under fire, and “actually [were] kicking two battalions’ worth of equipment off the ramp and getting out of there while we still could.”

“That type of decision was something that we made at the time because those forces needed those weapons and that equipment,” Petraeus told Colmes. “We weren’t going to stay there in the dark and make guys do a serial-number inventory and sign them up, and that is what happened. We believe those weapons all certainly were given to Iraqi units.”

That is no way to manage a prudent and successful military assistance program, General. Any supply sergeant with two years’ experience with IG inspections would have figured the keen idea of registering the weapons and writing down the serial numbers before loading them onto the slick.

So we’re not really sure just how well the Anbar Sunnis are braced, but were spending lots of cash to turn them into “concerned local citizens” patrolling their own neighborhoods and supposedly fighting off the occasional bandit group masquerading as “al Qaeda in Iraq.” It’s all good, just as long as they’re not killing GIs.

It’s important to remember that these “concerned citizens” are the very people that last week – OK, two months ago – were the resistance that was bitterly contesting Mr Bu$h’s occupation of their country. After expending millions of dollars in buying new super-duper IED-proof vehicles the Bu$h malAdministration wants us to believe they have finally discovered what those who understand COIN warfare have known all along: the real solution to insurgency warfare is political, and not military. You have to bring about conditions that make the insurgent want to lay down his arms. Killing off insurgents (and hapless innocent citizens) does not defeat a resistance.

There is a school of thought in military science that the occupying forces must create a better way of life for the citizens of the occupied country in order to create civil peace. The problem with buying off your rebels is that you must keep on paying them off, month after month after month in order to have civil peace. Since the Bu$h malAdministration has finally manipulated the Maliki government to “request” that the USG occupy Iraq indefinitely, despite any UN decision to no longer authorize occupation under their auspices, we can confidently look forward to bribing the Sunnis of Iraq from now until the oil finally runs out. Because, after all, they asked us to stay. Wink, wink, nudge, nudge.

I don’t have a lot of experience with this sort of foreign policy. I‘m somewhat familiar with mutual interest partnerships such as NATO and SEATO, but for outright bribery to bring about peace I had to go back and look up that “history” thing that the never-right hasn’t bothered with.

If you’re not familiar with the circumstances, there is a brief explanation of the Barbary Wars here.

The cost of tribute became unsupportable, and the US had to fight a long, painful, and expensive war to defeat the Barbary pirates.

A cynical observer might well conclude that bribing the people who were killing your soldiers just a short time ago might not work, long term, especially so if part of the bargain is to give them more and better armaments. It’s probably unfortunate that the ultimate beneficiaries of all this – Big Oil – won’t have to pay the price of tribute.

But what do I know? I’m just an old brokedown sergeant, and Generalissimo Field Marshal Fred Kagan outranks me.