Remember all those mysteriously lost US weapons in Iraq? Well, they've been found. The New York Times invested a crack team of investigative reporters and writer -- and came up with this:
American officials entrusted an Iraqi businessman with issuing weapons to Iraqi police cadets training to help quell the violence.
By all accounts, the businessman, Kassim al-Saffar, a veteran of the Iran-Iraq war, did well at distributing the Pentagon-supplied weapons from the Baghdad Police Academy armory he managed for a military contractor. But, co-workers say, he also turned the armory into his own private arms bazaar with the seeming approval of some American officials and executives, selling AK-47 assault rifles, Glock pistols and heavy machine guns to anyone with cash in hand — Iraqi militias, South African security guards and even American contractors.
“This was the craziest thing in the world,” said John Tisdale, a retired Air Force master sergeant who managed an adjacent warehouse. “They were taking weapons away by the truckload.”
If we could afford to lighten up a bit, we might also begin to think of the years of the Bush administration as "the craziest thing in the world." But the cost, the cost.
While the Pentagon has yet to offer its own accounting of how the weapons channel broke down, it is clear from interviews with two dozen military and civilian investigators, contracting officers, warehouse managers and others that military expediency sometimes ran amok, the lines between legal and illegal were blurred and billions of dollars in arms were handed over to shoestring commands without significant oversight.
"Expediency" in this case = political exigencies. Oh, and money.
American officers short-circuited the chain of custody by rushing to Baghdad’s airport to claim crates of newly arrived weapons without filing the necessary paperwork. And Iraqis regularly sold or stole the American-supplied weapons, American officers and contractors said.
The horrendous cost can be measured also in political and human losses.
There is evidence that some American-supplied weapons fell into the hands of guerrillas responsible for attacks against Turkey, an important United States ally.
And one of the most senior military officers involved is none other than David Petraeus.
Many of those weapons were issued when Gen. David H. Petraeus, now the top American commander in Iraq, was responsible for training and equipping Iraqi security forces in 2004 and 2005.
Reading through the New York Times' account, it's hard not to just throw this mess on the mountainous pile of Bush messes already out there and wonder whether it's worth bothering about the extent of the corruption. Seriously. But we want to know: will David Petraeus be hauled up before this Congress to explain why he turned a blind eye to the loss of 190,000 weapons, some of which were responsible for the killing of our military and the military of our allies? Or do we already know the answer to that?
