Cash becomes part of U.S. arsenal in dealing with Iraqis

By Doug Struck
The Washington Post

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Even patrol leaders now carry envelopes of cash. The money comes from brigade commanders, who get as much as $50,000 to $100,000 a month to distribute for local rehabilitation and emergency welfare projects through the Commanders Emergency Response Program.

But there are few restrictions on the expenditures, and officers acknowledge they consider the money another weapon. The targets are the restless legions of unemployed Iraqi men, many of them former soldiers, policemen and low-level members of the Baath Party of ousted President Saddam Hussein who were put out of work last year when the U.S. administrator, L. Paul Bremer, ordered a de-Baathification of Iraq.

U.S. soldiers say those men are vulnerable to entreaties to carry out an attack on the Americans for pay.

"I have met two guys now who say, 'I don't love you and I don't hate you. But somebody's offered me $200 to set up a mortar or a (roadside bomb), and there's a bonus if we kill you,' " said Lt. Col. Randall Potterf, the civil-affairs officer for the Army's 1st Infantry Division.

Restive central Iraq is full of men who "are young, unemployed, without hope," said Maj. Gen. John Batiste, the division commander. "We are trying to reach out to them. Whenever we get the money, we are trying to apply it to pull over as many of these men as we can to our side."

His local commanders have the go-ahead to dish out tens, hundreds and thousands of dollars with little more paperwork than a signed receipt. Often, the cash is paid in return for a promise to perform a small community project, but it also is given to Iraqis to buy items they say are necessary.

Lt. Col. Jeffrey Sinclair, commander of the 1st Battalion, 18th Infantry Regiment in Tikrit, said he had paid $500 so a driver could get his car repaired, paid "benevolent" money to the family of a victim of violence, paid people to clean streets, bought soccer uniforms for a team and repaired a swimming pool, among other expenditures. Other officers have given money to ice-cream vendors, chicken farmers and hardware suppliers to get their businesses going.

For more than a year, the Commanders Emergency Response Program was funded with $105 million taken from oil-generated Iraqi reconstruction funds.

But the Defense Department has agreed to begin paying for the program and has requested $300 million as part of its fiscal 2005 budget request to Congress. The program is popular with some members of Congress, who see it as bypassing the bureaucracy of the Iraq reconstruction program.

"This is economic warfare," said Lt. Col. Courtney Paul, executive officer of the 1st Infantry's engineer brigade headquartered in Tikrit.

"The anti-Iraqi forces are paying $50 to take part in an attack. That's one-third of the monthly pay of an Iraqi National Guardsman." By countering those payments, Paul said, "hopefully, we will be ready to dry up their supply of soldiers ready to do attacks."

The projects are "never going to get them to love America," said Potterf, the civil-affairs officer. "Nobody is going to ever be waving an American flag. But I just want them to be neutral, to stop planting explosives."

Copyright © 2004 The Seattle Times Company

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