Is the United States Responsible for Arming Insurgents?

The Pentagon has secretly shipped tens of thousands of small arms from Bosnia to Iraq in the past two years, using a web of private companies, at least one of which is a noted arms smuggler blacklisted by Washington and the UN.
According to a report by Amnesty International, which investigated the sales, the US government arranged for the delivery of at least 200,000 Kalashnikov machine guns from Bosnia to Iraq in 2004-05. But though the weaponry was said to be for arming the fledgling Iraqi military, there is no evidence of the guns reaching their recipient.

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I found this article to be very interesting. It's either irony or a conspiracy of some sort when you think of insurgents running around with weapons that the U.S. purchased. I wonder what other weapons are being purchased and shipped to Iraq? Maybe material for road-side bombs? Of course Iran and Saudi Arabia is probably funding a large stash of weapons, but the United States? Why would we want to ship all these weapons under the radar unless we had a sinister plan for them? Pure speculation on my part but the facts are not looking good if you plan on defending the U.S. on this case.

The insurgents have no problem here in Iraq getting weapons. Anyone with money can buy anything here, and for cheap. I suspect that when the Iraqi army folded, most of the weapons were lost from the inventory for this reason.

EIDS are still mostly made of surplus arty rounds, rockets, etc. I have seen no intel reports of any external explosives suspected of being from outside the country, EXCEPT for what has come across from Iran in the form of EFP EIDs. There are also reports of RPG rounds coming over from Syria, but that is about all of it.

We did buy thousands of Glocks for the Iraqi police...

Edit: Good topic for discussion, BTW. I also just saw an article someplace, I'll try and find it, suggesting that Britain shipped 20k civilian model Berrettas to Iraqi security forces (some of which are finding their way into the hands of insurgents) to get around EU arms export controls (if they were destined for the Iraqi Military, they should have been the military model, and gone through the arms export checks), and Britain did this without informing EU member nations - something to that effect. I will try and dig it up.

An interesting article from 2003, talks a little about the gun culture in Iraq. Seems to suggest a different reality than some other media perspectives.

www.csmonitor.com...

The sense of impending conflict means business is picking up at the capital's 43 gun shops, even though they are only licensed to sell hunting guns or pistols. Customers are stockpiling bullets or shotgun cartridges, says Wiham Ghazi of the "Free Bird" gun shop, whose 12-gauge shotguns and .22 caliber rifles hang from gun racks on the wall of his shop, emanating a faint scent of gun oil.

Iraqi concerns are two-fold: They are worried about the fallout from an American invasion; and they worry that civil unrest could erupt, as it did in 1991. The result of the latter fear is that urban areas since then have been armed as never before.

"No one would come close to a house at night, because everyone has guns," says a young educated Iraqi, who asked not to be named. "I tell people - and all the neighbors know it - that anyone who crosses this door will be shot."

Another angle, Rumsfeld says the guns come from Iran.

www.news24.com...

Some weapons entering Iraq are coming from Iran, US defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld said on Tuesday, though he indicated it was unclear whether they were coming from elements of the Iranian government or from other parties.

"Weapons clearly, unambiguously from Iran have been found in Iraq," he told a Pentagon briefing. "It's a big border. It's notably unhelpful for the Iranians to allow weapons of those types to cross the border."

But, some folks have this wacky idea that America itself arms more people than any other nation.

www.sfgate.com.../chronicle/archive/2003/03/02/IN123519.DTL

We tend to forget that the Reagan-Bush administration maintained cordial relations with Hussein in the '80s, promoting Iraq's eight-year war against Iran. Twenty-four U.S. firms exported arms and materials to Baghdad. France also sent Hussein 200 AMX medium tanks, Mirage bombers and Gazelle helicopter gunships. As Assistant Secretary of Defense Richard Armitage testified in 1987:

"We cannot stand to see Iraq defeated." The CIA, State Department, the central military command directing Middle East operations, were well aware of Iraq's biological-weapons efforts. Nevertheless, Iraq's applications were seldom denied.

The infamous massacre at Halabja -- the gassing of the Kurds -- took place in March 1988. Six months later, on Sept. 19, a Maryland company sent 11 strains of germs -- four types of anthrax -- to Iraq, including a microbe strain called 11966, developed for germ warfare at Fort Detrick in the 1950s.

These folks say:

www.cdi.org...

The majority of military-style weapons in the hands of civilians in Iraq come from three sources, according to media reports. First, civilians possess weapons from government arsenals that were looted in 1991. Second, weapons have been provided from Iran, which has provided support for the main Shia rebel group. Third, the Iraqi government has provided AK-47s to leaders of Sunni and Shi'ite tribal leaders for dispersal.

My emphasis. Is this a self-reinforcing error in logic? Doesn't this presume media authenticity, which is highly dubious? Or is it just that the answer is a little more complex than can be fit into a 30 second news brief? Is it just a little more complicated than the partisan media weenies would have everyone believe?

200k guns..that's a lot of guns, no doubt, but I think a look at the broader context is in order. It's really not as simple as 'Bush/Reagan did it' or 'France did it' or 'Hussein did it' - a lot of people 'did it', and are 'doing it' as we speak.

But, I really don't think it's a coincidence that the worst proliferator nations are taking an active role in the suppression of violence that rises up in the wake of the gun flood. It's no different than the firefighters who start fires to make work for themselves, except a lot more people die as a result of this level of irresponsibility.

[edit on 13-5-2006 by WyrdeOne]

Iraqi adults are allowed to legally own an AK or a pistol. Many do so for their own protection. I have never seen an Iraqi cop with a berretta, but maybe they do down in Basra where the Brits control things. The Glock is a better pistol anyhow. It used to be that the new police grads would sell their glocks and use a CZ or something they liked better.

Ammo prices have gone up slightly, but there is still plenty around. But, 45 ammo is very hard to come by...

I saw the new Iraqi army being issued with brand new AKs that I think came from Romania. New PKMs as well. Just yesterday I saw an Iraqi special forces unit with M4 carbines. These guys were really squared away and knew their stuff.

I've seen Lord of War twice in the last two days; convenient timing.

I submit to you that the US never planned to stabilize Iraq. Nobody this good screws up this bad. There was an army of questionable loyalty to Saddam sitting around; most of them never fired a shot at us. We took their guns and sent them home.

In 3 years we still haven't built effective police forces in Iraq. We haven't shut down the borders to the supposed arms suppliers and to the best of my knowledge even those nations haven't accused us of attacking targets within their borders (presumably we'd be finding and hitting the depots the weapons were coming from and they'd be screaming to high heaven about it).

America wrote the book on setting up highly functional dystopias, and we've broken every rule in that book in our handling of Iraq.

I think we're doing what nobody ever would have let us do. We're splitting Iraq into the 3 states that it was during the Ottoman period. We'll pull out eventually, the civil war will intensify as we ship weapons in.

Iran will move on the Shia South and we will have our pretext for war with Iran because Southern Iraq threatens Kuwait and Saudi as well as controls a good deal of oil. Kurdistan will secceed and we'll invite Turkey to seize it and tie in our Northern flank against Iranian action while they are at it.

When the gunsmoke settles the Sunni triangle will unite with Syria (just like President Bakr tried to do with all of Iraq in 1979, resulting in Saddam's coup).

The Shia South will be a pseudo-democracy run by the propertied classes, probably with Sistani in charge. They'll follow the Kuwait model and have US puppet strings so far up in their intestines and reigned in so tightly that their farts will sound like piano music.

Originally posted by dbates
Maybe material for road-side bombs?

I wouldn't be surprised if they weren't using the explosives that were stolen a while back for that. If you remember the tons of explosives stolen from one of our bases maybe 2 years back.




Pie