US loses more AK-47s in Iraq than Chavez bought

http://www.btcnews.com/btcnews/1717

When the Washington Post reported that the Pentagon has lost more than 100,000 Ak-47s in Iraq, along with a number of other combat items, the number rang a bell. A little more than two years ago, at the same time as we were tossing guns into the void, then defense-secretary Donald Rumsfeld was fretting publicly about Venezuela’s plans to buy 100,000 AK-47s. “I just hope that, personally hope, that it doesn’t happen… I can’t imagine that if it did happen, that it would be good for the hemisphere.”

Hugo Chavez did eventually buy his rifles; it’s a fair bet he kept better track of them than we did ours.

To be fair, we should note that even if the US knew exactly who got the missing weapons in Iraq — which were distributed by General David Patraeus, then in charge of training Iraqi forces and now in charge of attempting to control them — the chances are quite good that they would still have ended up in the hands of people using them against our troops. But good accounting might have prevented us from giving new rifles to Iraqi troops who had already received and misappropriated them. Considering that the weapons unaccounted for represent more than half of the total number Petraeus dispensed, and that we’ve continued to supply new weapons in the two years since the audit period, it seems likely that most of the ones that fell off the back of the truck eventually wound up in the hands of insurgents or militias. Probably not good for that particular slice of the hemisphere. Damn that Hugo Chavez.

I mean, except for a couple of hundred pieces used for training, the US Military does not stock AK-47's in its arsenal (for reasons that escape me, the US military is averse to 7.62 individual weapons in general). When I was there, during and right after the invasion, they were taking weapons from Iraqi arsenals (generally AK-47's and AK-74's) and handing them out to mercs because the mercs couldn't get clearance to buy the weapons in the US (just as well, IMO). I'd be willing to bet a large number of the missing rifles went missing then, and probably made it back via the merc companies to the US and Eastern Europe.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/armstrade/story/0,,1773106,00.html

Ian Traynor in Zagreb
Friday May 12, 2006
The Guardian

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.

Senior western officials in the Balkans fear that some of the guns may have fallen into the wrong hands.
A Nato official described the trade as the largest arms shipments from Bosnia since the second world war.

The official told Amnesty: "Nato has no way of monitoring the shipments once they leave Bosnia. There is no tracking mechanism to ensure they do not fall into the wrong hands. There are concerns that some of the weapons may have been siphoned off."

I'd forgotten about that little escapade, but the weapons in the Post story are part of a large purchase officially contracted by the Pentagon. The problem (one of the problems) with the weapons from the Balkans is that no one knows whether or not they ever reached Iraq; with the ones Petraeus misplaced, we know they got there but not who ultimately wound up with them after they left Petraeus's hands.

These are weapons the Pentagon http://www.defenselink.mil/contracts/contract.aspx?contractid=2947">bought from third parties specifically for the purpose of arming Iraqi forces.


I remember this well because I spent several fruitless weeks at the time trying to find out why we were giving some http://www.ite-me.com">Jordanian company the contract instead of buying directly from a manufacturer or an American arms dealer, particularly with respect to the M4s. The Post story includes references to the handguns and night vision goggles, so I'm sure this is part of the same deal.

Not to mention the millions of tons of munitions that were stolen in 2004 from the ammo dumps that weren't protected so that the soldiers could protect the oil ministry building complex.

I would have also if I was in charge of a country
with so much potential for american invasion.

chavez is trying to do socialism differently than it has ever been done
and is sitting on the largest proven oil deposits in this hemisphere

If we hadn't gotten so bogged down in Iraq
we would already have invaded Venezuela