WAKING:

Another Iraqi "Awakening" (Jeff Emanuel, 8/27/2007, American Spectator)

THE FIRST SIGNIFICANT SIGN OF SUCCESS resulting from the Army's public relations campaign in the southern part of the region was seen very recently, in the area just north of Salman Pak, along the road known to 3rd Brigade as "Route Wild," between the villages of Wuerdiya and Ja'ara -- and it all began with a simple cell phone call. During the first week of August, an Iraqi man who lived in the area, whose brother was the sheik of their tribe (the "al Jabouri"), called Captain Rich Thompson, head of 3rd Brigade's Baker Company 1-15 Infantry and the local ground commander, and asked for a meeting. Tired of the persistent insurgent infighting in his area -- and of its effect on the people of his tribe and his village -- the man wanted information on starting his tribe's own "Concerned Citizens" brigade, to augment the National Police and to defend their land and their clan against terrorism.

Called "basically a thumb in the eye at a Maliki government that won't get its [act] together" by one officer I spoke with, the Concerned Citizens program, another brainchild of MNF-I commanding General David Petraeus, puts ground-level security in the hands of the individual tribes and groups who need it most. The program, which has been implemented in other regions of Iraq as well (like Diyala Province), allows for members of individual tribes to arm themselves and to conduct their own security operations and patrols, provided that they agree to wear easily identifiable (and coalition-acknowledged) uniforms, to work with and respect the authority of the National Police and coalition forces, and to submit to being entered into the coalition's biometric identification database.

"I hope they're really serious about [this]," Thompson, a former enlisted Army Ranger, told me, as he prepared to attend the meeting with the leadership if the al Jabouri tribe. "If we can get them going with their own security, and the other tribes around them can see what a good thing they have and decide that they want it too, then we could see a serious improvement in this area." Thompson's view on the insurgency in Iraq is a very simple one: "I don't want them in my AO (area of operations). I don't care where they go, as long as they're not here -- and, if everybody takes that attitude, Iraqis and soldiers alike, and works for that goal, then sooner or later there won't be any place for [the insurgents] to go."

The premise of the Concerned Citizens program is simply the belief that citizen empowerment, backed by the coalition, will lead to a rejection of the forces that terrorize the civilian population in a given area. While the sweeping change in Anbar Province that accompanied last fall's "Anbar Awakening" was in part a result of the tribal leaders in that area responding to the Marines' daily efforts to build trust and rapport in the region, it was much more a response to the insurgents' constant promise of no brighter future than the chaos that had become the norm in the area in recent years. Fed up with those who offered, in the words of one tribal sheik, "only death," the leaders of those tribes made the eminently rational decision to rise up against the terrorists, and to work with the coalition to build a free and independent network of tribes and clans that is rapidly becoming a relatively united province once again -- only without the iron fist of Saddam Hussein holding it together.