If you can’t beat them…. put them on the payroll! Iraqi insurgents that is. It appears that our government has finally successfully introduced the American way to the Iraqis and the insurgents that have been slowly killing American and allied force soldiers. WE ARE PAYING THEM IN CASH…… you can’t get any more American than that, right?

A key military writer for the neo-conservative magazine, The Weekly Standard, was clearly distressed when he appeared on C-SPAN, saying, "The American people have become very frustrated with the course of this war. They should be frustrated. We’re losing."

So now the AMERICAN forces are paying Sunni insurgents hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash to switch sides and help them to defeat Al-Qaeda in Iraq. The tactic has boosted the efforts of American forces to restore some order to war-torn provinces around Baghdad in the run-up to a report by General David Petraeus, the US commander, to Congress tomorrow.

Some 70,000 former insurgents are now being paid $10 a day by the U.S. military. It costs about a quarter billion dollars a year.

Retired Army Col. Douglas Macgregor warns, “It’s a controversial strategy, that it’s creating a parallel military force in Iraq that is made up almost entirely of Sunni Muslims.”

"We need to understand that buying off your enemy is a good short-term solution to gain a respite from violence," he says, "but it’s not a long-term solution to creating a legitimate political order inside a country that, quite frankly, is recovering from the worst sort of civil war."

So you decide. Is the paying off off our former enemies, aka Iraqi insurgents a good thing that should be the driving strategy of the most powerful military power in the world? Or do you see it as just another finger in the dike?