By DHinMI
About a month back the NYT reported that in the weeks immediately following the collapse of Saddam's army--the period of widespread looting which the US forces didn't (and because there were too few of them probably couldn't) stop--entire weapons factories were dismantled and vanished into the black market. Now, with US and Iraqi forces exercising tighter control over movement between Iran and Iraq, black marketeers are trying to smuggle some of the looted equipment into Iran, such as the entire contents of an Iraqi artillery factory seized a few months ago at a border crossing. If equipment related to conventional weapons is reappearing, what about the sophisticated equipment that can be used to develop and produce weapons of mass destruction?
Much more valuable machinery also vanished from some of the sites in the weeks after the invasion: so-called dual-use equipment, which could be used in civilian manufacturing and in building parts for nuclear weapons. Witness accounts have indicated that much of it was carried off in systematic looting in the six to eight weeks after Baghdad fell on April 9, 2003. That equipment, which investigators say was more likely coveted for its monetary value rather than its military value, disappeared without any public trace. If an entire artillery factory could come this close to crossing the border, some military specialists say, then the dual-use equipment had a chance of getting out as well.
Since our invasion into Iraq was supposedly to eliminate the ability of one of the members of the "axis of evil" to threaten us with WMD, it's hard to consider that endeavor a success. All we appear to have accomplished in terms of the threat of WMD is enhance the WMD capabilities of Iran, a country that would be exceedingly difficult to invade and probably impossible to occupy, and against which there are none of the highly restrictive embargoes that appear to have halted Saddam's progress on nuclear weapons and seriously eroded his capabilities in biological and chemical warfare.
The other problem is that now we're paying for material the we had supposedly already captured in March and April of 2003:
"Spare parts?" said Staff Sgt. William Larock, an American reservist in a division out of Rochester, N.Y., who is stationed near Munthriya and is coordinating repairs of some of Mr. Hussein's old troop carriers to be used for the new Iraqi Army. "A lot of them come from the market in Baghdad."
Sergeant Larock said that some of his repairs to the vehicles, which Mr. Hussein bought from a manufacturer in Brazil, were being delayed because the asking price on the highly specialized wheels - clearly stolen long ago from those same vehicles - was too high. "That's why these things are sitting on blocks," he said with a faint smile...
When it comes to buying run-of-the-mill equipment and spare parts that were obviously looted in the past, the American military appears to have adopted some version of a don't-ask, don't-tell policy concerning where the materials originated. The materials, after all, are now being sold openly in street markets. So the Americans appear resigned to buying the equipment back rather than seizing it.
We invaded Iraq to protect us from WMD that Saddam didn't have, but the White House and Pentagon so botched up the occupation that the machinery and material Saddam did posses that could be used to develop WMD has now gone to a country--Iran--that unlike Iraq has supported trans-national terrorism over the last two decades. In addition, the equipment that supposedly came under the control of the US after the collapse of Saddam's military was looted, so instead of just seizing the equipment, now we have to buy it back--in effect, we're paying for it twice, the first time by defeating Saddam's army, the second time by purchasing it on the black market.
About the only screw-up not mentioned would be if we lost possession of weapons and material used by the Iraqi insurgents to attack American troops. Well, that's covered as well:
Interviews with people who identified themselves as arms dealers or members of the resistance in Baghdad, Falluja and other Iraqi cities indicate that a parallel black market operates in the explosives looted from some of the same sites. In fact, sketchy descriptions by members of the Iraqi resistance suggest that the arms market is also a highly developed enterprise with brokers, buyers and looters who have stockpiled their products, including artillery shells, mortar rounds and Kalashnikov rifles. One former Iraqi army officer who said that he had joined the mujahedeen said that in Sadr City, for example, a few trusted brokers would take prospective buyers to weapons caches that ranged in size from a few rounds buried in a garden to whole rooms of ordnance. If the broker and the buyers agreed on a price, the buyers would arrive a day or two later with a vehicle to drive their purchases away. The broker and the stockpilers would have worked out their respective cuts in advance.
The Pentagon failed to secure the assets of the defeated Iraqi military-industrial complex, and now those assets are being used against our troops and possibly to strengthen one of our avowed rivals. Paul Wolfowitz, the second-ranking person on the team that botched the occupation and failed to prevent military assets from being looted and in some cases used against our troops, has been promoted by the Bush Administration to head up the World Bank, where he will be responsible for securing, protecting and responsibly using the Bank's monetary assets. With its contempt for international institutions, one has to wonder if the Bush administration nominated Wolfowitz to lead the World Bank despite his role in losing control of the Iraqi military assets, or because of it.
The insideous irony unfolding from this fiasco is that Iran becomes the next threatening repository of WMD. Bush's move to protect the Homeland is, of course, to bomb the living shit out of all suspected Iranian WMD facilities in June or July. Net result? 4 more years of the unfolding 1000 year repugnican reich. Well, at least the Times is reporting something factual now, now that it is too late to do anything about policy. Why no Times "insight" about the implications of the WMD bazaar? wait here comes Judith with the answers.
Posted by: vetfordean | April 17, 2005 at 15:58
I was not of this opinion a few months ago, but I now believe the administration not only knew full well that the wmd argument was trumped up, but that the administration's intent was always to secure a footprint in Iraq while trying to establish a friendlt government to secure American access to oil.
This kind of information - terrifying information - makes me turn to that point of view.
Posted by: Pachacutec | April 17, 2005 at 17:02
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