The Saudis get their way, the US will fund the insurgency

Yesterday, administration figures openly criticized the Saudi government for its aid and support for the insurgency in Iraq.

Today, we find out that the Saudis will get rewarded, "U.S. Set to Offer Huge Arms Deal to Saudi Arabia."

(The short explanation from the pro-Saudi US side is that this is an effort to buy off Saudi fears of Iranian influence.)

Far more troubling is the second leg of the US plan to assuage Saudi interests.

The U.S. military in Iraq is expanding its efforts to recruit and fund armed Sunni residents as local protection forces in order to improve security and promote reconciliation at the neighborhood level, according to senior U.S. commanders.....

The goal is to put the new, irregular forces in place quickly -- hiring them on contracts and providing them with uniforms without waiting for access to lengthy police and army training programs.

So, in effect, the US will take over the Saudi role of supporting Sunni groups. The idea, I assume, is that the US will have more control over who gets the money and thus have a greater influence on these groups, but this will also a return to the days of neighborhood protection groups when local Sunnis would fight any Iraqi government forces that tried to enter Sunni areas.

This will have an effect of curtailing some of the Shia militia neighborhood cleansing, but it will also create Sunni safe havens, even in the heart of Baghdad, outside of Iraqi government control.

(And, by the way, what in the hell does "bottom up reconciliation" mean? The US has been using this phrase to describe this program.

"This is a very, very important component of reconciliation because it's happening from the bottom up," (Petraeus) said in an interview Friday. "The bottom-up piece is much farther along than any of us would have anticipated a few months back. It's become the focus of a great deal of effort, as there is a sense that this can bear a lot of fruit."

This sounds more like trying to create a static balance of forces than reconciliation. These Sunni neighborhood groups are lessening their attacks against the US, not making peace with the Shia government.

This could be a preparatory step to the US pulling back, but I don't see how in the world the US's supporting of armed Sunni groups can be called reconciliation.)

The bottom line subtext of all of this is the assumption that the Iraqi government will not ever disarm/disband the Shia militias.

(PS. Is part of the arms deal that the Saudis and Egyptians will stay out of the nuclear pool?)