One of the time-honored tactics for coping with an insurgency is to take the opponents into the government, to give them a piece of the action. It is just like a farm subsidy program, except you're paying people not to plant land mines instead of crops.
I saw this work when I was in grammar school. The school announced that they would form a "safety patrol" of sixth-graders; they took the top three students from each class and gave them white cotton Sam Browne belts. The teachers took those kids to the office, leaving the classrooms unattended. Near revolts erupted. The other kids in the classrooms began yelling back and forth and some of them were loudly talking about ambushing the members of the safety patrol and beating them up.
What none of us realized, at the time, was that those PA speakers in the classrooms worked both ways, they could listen in on the classrooms. Which they apparently were doing. The teachers were listening to the uproar and identifying who the kids were who were most active in plotting to beat up the safety patrol.
The administration had a plan, of course. The teachers reappeared in the classrooms and took the plotters to the office, where all of the plotters were also given the white belts of the safety patrol. None of the kids, of course, were sophisticated enough to realize what had just happened and they all were thrilled to now be cops. They kept order.
That lesson works for insurgencies as well. The Iraqi government would do well to keep those Sunni former insurgents on the payroll.
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