Gorilla’s Guides published a nice article yesterday about the Anbar Awakening, giving some toothy background details about the movement that Western readers had not read before.

"Our goal was always to drive off the U.S. occupiers from our country, but we and al-Qaida have different goals. We want to liberate our country … while al-Qaida wants to establish their own extremist Islamic State in Iraq," said Ahmad Hameed, 35, a member of a local Awakening Council-style group in the Ghazaliyah neighborhood of Baghdad.

"We decided to fight the al-Qaida militants because they started to assassinate fighters and leaders from the resistance groups. They tend to kill indiscriminately." said Hameed at the checkpoint at the neighborhood entrance with a pistol on the hip and an assault rifle in his hand. [emph added]

Americans who might have been living in Cloud Cuckoo Land would be wise to memorize the above paragraph. The Anbar Awakening was part of the resistance. They stopped killing Americans for two reasons: the a-Q interlopers (i.e. Saudis) were becoming a serious problem and had to be eliminated, and they are remaining quiet only because the US is paying them to stay quiet. You might think that one the Saudis and their colleagues in a-Q are finally disposed of, the tribes could very well become ”restive” again.

The Saudis apparently were not nice people:

Sa’ad al-Rawi, 27, accused al-Qaida terrorists of luring young Iraqis, even children, into planting bombs and killing them later when they refused to obey any longer.

"We saw al-Qaida doing terrible things. They were killing and displacing Sunnis, Shiites and Christians. We could not leave our houses and were afraid of snipers. Therefore we decided to fight them," said Rawi.

That comment about a-Q displacing people is interesting because it hints at ethnic cleansing which heretofore was considered a tactic employed only by the Shiite militias.

The middle-class East Ghazaliyah area houses about 5,000 residents. One of the two highways surrounding it leads to the Baghdad Airport and used to be the most dangerous road in the world for the U.S. troops.

Once a ghost town with bodies dumped in the streets, the neighborhood now is seeing a recovering as shops are open and people begin venturing out, with CLCs manning the checkpoints and searching vehicles seriously. The Iraqi security forces, who are predominately Shiites, guard only at the outer checkpoints.

Deeply frustrated by the failure of national reconciliation and slow buildup of a capable Iraqi security force, the U.S. seems pleased to jump at the windfall of the showdown to relieve the strained troops and is encouraging the growth of the CLCs by means like paying.

Omer Adnan, who dropped out of college last year to take care of his family following his father’s death in a car bombing, said he had just signed a new three-month CLC contract with the Americans but he complained that the pay of 350 U.S. dollars per month is not enough to support his family.

Great. Less than a year into our 21st century practice of paying off this version of the Barbary Pirates and we’re already looking at a pending demand for more tribute.

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.

Coincidently, IraqSlogger (subs req) has an article today noting that the Shiite central government plans to absorb no more than 20% of these Sunni tribesmen into the security forces.

Also coincidently, IraqSlogger (subs req) has another article today detailing a memo sent our by GEN Petraeus to the troops of MNF-I, patting himself on the back for “significant progress” and warning them of future “unforeseen challenges.” The disappointment of only 20% of these tribesmen getting jobs might qualify as a “challenge.”