ABSTRACT
During the summer of 2007, some two dozen men wearing Iraqi police uniforms stormed a bank branch in the Ameriyah neighborhood of Baghdad. Their takeover of the bank was part of a concerted strategy by Iraqi insurgents to reduce services to the Sunni population in the area and to undermine confidence in the Iraqi government. It quickly became apparent to United States Army officers that the reopening of the bank was a critical step toward restoring basic governance services in Iraq and central to convincing Sunnis that they had a political and economic future in Iraq. The Army lieutenant colonel in charge of operations in the area observed that “armed politics” rather than all-out war characterized the challenges he faced, and that his job was to convince the locals “to have more faith in the government than [in] the extremists.”1
