Word: soi
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...decision to dissolve the Iraqi army proved to be a key strategic blunder that gave a massive boost to the insurgency. This week the U.S. will try again, transferring control of 54,000 of the 100,000-strong largely Sunni citizen patrols known as the Sons of Iraq (SOI) to a Shi'ite-led government many of them view with suspicion. The rest will remain on the U.S payroll, as part of a phased transfer...
...Brigadier General David Perkins, the senior officer overseeing the SOI transition, rejects the comparison as invalid. "This is a completely different situation than when the army was dissolved," he says, "because [for the Iraqi army] there were no guarantees, there were no contracts, there were no transition plans, there were no rehearsals, there were no efforts made by anyone." This time, he says, the U.S. military has exerted "an enormous amount of time and energy" to make sure "this is done properly...
...Unlike the members of the former Iraqi army, who were abruptly dismissed and deprived of their livelihoods, each SOI member will continue to be paid during the transition, regardless of whether he ends up in the security forces or a trade apprenticeship. On average, each guard gets a salary of about $300 a month. In a country where unemployment is running at a staggering 60% (according to the quarterly U.S. report on reconstruction efforts), the payments are welcome, but not enough, according to al-A'ghayde...
...want to reduce the number of checkpoints," he says. "Do you want the Iraqi security forces and the Sahwa (SOIs) to remain on the streets 24 hours a day?" he asks Sheikh al-A'ghayde, who has stopped at an unusually sturdy-looking SOI checkpoint. Most are little more than flimsy wooden shacks reinforced with a few sheets of corrugated iron and propped up with several sandbags...
Even among soi-disant “progressives,” the idea of progress is out of vogue these days, either written off as a relic of the Enlightenment or denounced as a canard of Western imperialism. For a bygone older generation, the myth of progress perished with Hiroshima: It symbolized the advent of a world in which our scientific intelligence had become tragically commensurate to our most vicious appetites...