Could Iris Scans Stop a New Iraq Insurgency?

By Noah Shachtman | Iraq’s government and Sunni militias appear to be headed for a showdown. One of the things that just might keep a full-blown insurgency from erupting again, a leading expert in the region says, is a set of databases of fingerprints and irises, built by the U.S. military — and fed with data from Saddam.

The extra troops get all the credit, in the dumbed-down political debate. But one of the biggest reasons for Iraq’s turnaround was the decision by Sunnis — many of them former insurgents — to begin backing the U.S., instead. They were organized into local militias, called “Sons of Iraq,” and promised government jobs, in return for the service. And just to convince the Sunnis that American forces had their best interests at heart, we they fed ‘em a steady diet of anti-Shi’a propaganda.

But the jobs never completely materialized. And Iraq’s largely Shi’ite national government is slamming down on the Sons of Iraq, with apparently American backing. “Our goal is that by June 2009, the Sons of Iraq are out of business,” Lt. Col. Jeffrey Kulmayer said over the weekend.

“It is obvious where this road might end,” Shawn Brimley and Colin Kahl write in today’s Los Angeles Times. “The last time tens of thousands of armed Sunni men were humiliated in Iraq — by disbanding the Baath Party and Iraqi army in May 2003 — an insurgency began, costing thousands of U.S. lives and throwing Iraq into chaos. Yet Maliki and his advisors risk provoking Iraq’s Sunni community into another round of violence.”

So what’s to stop another Sunni insurgency from boiling over? After all, “it doesn’t take 100,000 of these guys to revert to insurgents to cause big trouble. Remember, at the height of the insurgency, the U.S. estimated that there were 8,000-20,000 fighters,” Kahl — a Georgetown professor and a Center for a New American Security senior fellow — tells DANGER ROOM.

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