This is kind of depressing.
Abu Nawall, a captured al-Qaeda in Iraq leader, said he didn’t join the Sunni insurgent group here to kill Americans or to form a Muslim caliphate. He signed up for the cash.
“I was out of work and needed the money,” said Abu Nawall, the nom de guerre of an unemployed metal worker who was paid as much as $1,300 a month as an insurgent. He spoke in a phone interview from an Iraqi military base where he is being detained. “How else could I support my family?”
Jeebus. $1300 a month would buy you one 23rd of a Blackwater guard. It’s about 1/150th of what it costs to run this war for one second. That $9 billion that we pissed down an unaccountable black hole would buy us one tenth the population of Iraq for three months. Disturbingly, stories like this imply that throwing tens of billions at corrupt contractors who aggravate the local population by flying in foreign (slave) labor and build leaky crap that doesn’t work was not necessarily the best use of our funds. I’m telling you, the American Enterprise Institute will be devastated.
Then we could revisit the genius decision to fire the Iraqi army. Even granting that this war might have been hopeless from the outset, some days it truly look like they wanted to lose.
PaulW
So if we paid this guy $1500 a month to NOT be an insurgent… well, what is the cost benefit analysis here? Can we determine that paying 150,000 Iraqis and foreign-born insurgents $1500 or more a month is feasible compared to the $20 billion in lost unaccountable payments to foreign companies that might not even exist?
capelza
Anymore, when some neo-con free market pundit/blogger/beer stool meathead tells me that this is the way it should be I refer them tot he Bremer regime and ask them to tell how that little petri dish experiment in all the goodies these jackasses want to sell us worked out.
I agree, they did exactly everything to fail. How could they NOT do it on purpose? Unlss they are truly that incompetent.
Zifnab
Do they get full medical and dental? Cause it might only be 1/23 of a Blackwater guard, but it’s still around $15k/year, which is decent money in a war-torn hell hole.
Of course, if it makes you feel any better, Tim, that $9 billion we pissed down a black hole may have actually popped up again in his pay stub. That would, at least, explain why everything in Iraq costs so damn much. We’re being forced to fund both the troops AND the insurgency.
Bubblegum Tate
I’ll bet this guy changes his tune and admits he hates us for our freedom once we waterboard the shit out of him.
Like anybody has ever done anything just for the money–what a load!
Kallisti
Can I just ask, though I know it’s War Pimp bait, but where’s the money coming from?
Tim F.
If it’s AQI then the money is mostly coming from Saudi Arabia. Iran mostly funds Shiites, although they are known to hedge.
El Cruzado
And that’s yet another reminder of why disbanding the Iraqi army was the most stupid fucking idea of the 21st century. As it stood, it basically meant a few hundred thousand people (and their extended families) would get paid not to blow up Americans or get in trouble. Which would have been a great thing.
Cyrus
On the other hand, it would buy you one whole me. (Admittedly, that’s only take-home pay; I earn more once you count taxes, insurance buy-in, etc.) I think I might be in the wrong fucking business.
LiberalTarian
“Even granting that this war might have been hopeless from the outset, some days it truly look like they wanted to lose.”
If we really did win, how could they bankrupt the treasury and do away with all those services our government provides to the poor, young, sick and elderly?
GW Bush has been a nightmare for 97% of the people on this planet, but someone somewhere is laughing all the way to the bank.
Laertes
The war in Iraq could cost over $2 trillion. It’s gone on for, what, about four and a half years now?
It turns out that we could have hired every single man, woman, and child in Iraq for $1300 a month for four and a half years, for a tiny bit less than $2 trillion.
Why are we doing this the hard way?
JoyceH
Years ago when I was still in the Navy, there was a list making the rounds called Murphy’s Laws On Combat. It was a xerox of a xerox of a xerox, that some of you might remember as circulating conventional wisdom and humor from the days before e-mail. It consisted of a bunch of adages about combat, such as “If they can’t get in, you can’t get out”, “never forget that your weapons were made by the lowest bidder”, and “the diversion you’re ignoring is the main attack.”
But it ended with one over-arching prime directive Murphy’s Law On Combat that I keep remembering as I watch news coverage of this misbegotten war:
“The side with the simplest uniform wins.”
Win Gnutistan
Uh…uh…if. Clinton. Hadn’t…been busy getting blow jobs … um … he could’ve caught Osama bin Laden and we wouldn’t have had to invade Iraq.
IT’S ALL CLINTON’S FAULT!
Phew!
croatoan
“What’s he paying you boys? I’ll double it and we’ll beat the shit out of him.”
— Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid
Ugh
Ding ding ding ding. We have a winner. The Bush administration in particular and the current version of the GOP more generally have been set up to do two things (i) aggrandize as much power to themselves a possible; and (ii) deliver as much of this country’s wealth to the richest 1% of taxpayers as possible (the latter goal is shared by the WJS editorial page). In this they have been wildly successful.
Jackmormon
Yeah, that’s more than most adjunct and student teachers get to teach in America’s Prestigious Universities. Depressing.
Ugh
And, as Tim notes, if the Saudis really are funding the insurgents that kill U.S. troops in Iraq, then, economically via our purchases of oil from the Saudis, we’re paying the insurgents to kill our own troops; and also providing a convenient excuse for Bush to keep the troops in Iraq. It’s like a four-fer.
Tsulagi
See, Tim, that’s your problem. You don’t highlight the positive. At least we’re not paying contractors billions of dollars flying in slave labor to shoot up the local population.
Oh. I guess we are doing that.
Okay, but even though Blackwater is paying those Columbian mercs about $1k mo., I’m sure Blackwater doesn’t bill our government much more than that for overhead. Or for the several thousand others they’ve recruited from South Africa, Chile, the Philippines, and elsewhere to bring freedom and democracy to the ME.
Shit, I sure hope those Columbians don’t realize they could get a raise working for AQ.
rawshark
Its not that they wanted to lose, they just didn’t have any desire to win anytime soon. The object of war is to be at war.
Phoebe
I got the same impression, that they were not interested in winning, or were interested in creating a totally disintegrating hellhole, from the movie “No End in Sight”. I could not figure out the motive, though. Which is not to say that this made me abandon my theory, I just am very curious as to what they were thinking.
fester
Regarding where the money is coming from — elsewhere in the article he states the entire ISI operation in Mosul cost about $6 million a year for up to 30 attacks per day, which works out to be about $600/attack min., and that their revenue sources were a combination of foreign funding laundered through Syria and locally derived revenue from a combination of sin taxes, taxes, and kidnapping for ransom. Other groups also are grabbing cash from generic corruption, generic smuggling, and oil smuggling.
Andy K
Luxury!
g-rant
Milo Minderbinder would be proud.
Chad N. Freude
By bankrupting the nation, the Bush administration will ensure that US citizens (and illegal aliens, for that matter) will be unable to buy Saudi oil products, thus eliminating the flow of money to the insurgents, starving the insurgency and thus ending the war. Genius!!! Sheer genius!!!
jake
Did you ever roll a tire down a hill when you were a kid? Ever start out giggling as it rolled faster and faster and then it bounced into someone’s car or knocked a little kid flat or some other horrible “Oh shit, we’re dead!” thing your tiny brain never imagined when you started it on its journey?
George Bush is the kid, the US Military is the tire. Iraq (and the troops) is everything that got in the way.
Heh.
Tayi
$1300 a month might buy you one 23rd of a Blackwater guard, but it’ll buy you an entire private in the US Army. Well, ok, $1300 plus $1.40 gets you E-1 monthly pay.
As a disabled veteran unable to work due to injuries acquired during my military service, of course, I’ve been living on less than half that for a couple years now. I wonder what al Qaeda’s retirement plan looks like.
John S.
That is brilliant.
mk
Murphy’s Law of Combat Operations (Murphys Military Law)
Thanks. That was worth the search.
Cain
From Murphys’ Law of Combat Operations
Amen!
cain
scarshapedstar
Chaos is the plan. Always has been.
As always, I defy anyone to produce any evidence to the contrary.
Royston Vasey
– There were a hundred and fifty of us living in t’ shoebox in t’ middle o’ road.
– Cardboard box?
– Aye.
– You were lucky. We lived for three months in a paper bag in a septic tank. We used to have to get up at six in the morning, clean the paper bag, eat a crust of stale bread, go to work down t’ mill, fourteen hours a day, week-in week-out, for sixpence a week, and when we got home our Dad would thrash us to sleep wi’ his belt.
TenguPhule
There was no plan.
Only ‘How do we make a buck off of this?’