The buy back hustle

Normally I stay away from foreign policy, but this TNR column on what to do in Iraq sort of demands a response. In it, Niall Ferguson argues that what the U.S. government needs to do is to bribe the various insurgent groups and warring parties, starting the major step of buying up their weapons. Basically, his argument is that “with a fraction of the money that goes to our boys' cheeseburgers, you could buy and decommission all the AK-47s in Iraq.”

But what Ferguson is doing is confusing the value of the AK 47s with the money we’d have to spend on them. And, more importantly, he’s assuming that the insurgents, who I think most reasonable people agree are pretty heavily invested against U.S. forces on a personal level, would play ball. Unlikely doesn’t even begin to cover it. Instead, they’d probably charge us a premium on the weapons, knowing what we have at stake. Some groups would likely hold out on us, selling many of their weapons—again, at a premium—but keeping a significant amount in reserve. Those with reserves would continue attacks, causing those without to use the extortion money to rearm, possibly even at a higher level than they began with (due to the high sums paid). The end result would likely be that weapon buy back program would get abused by warring sects looking to take advantage of their rivals and that some groups would try (and quite possibly succeed) to use the program as a trade-up to better weapons—hardly the sort of result anyone’s looking for.