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Tuesday, September 18, 2007

Uh...does the word "mujahadeen" ring a bell?
Posted by Jill | 8:13 AM
Haven't we been here before:

The grand debate about Gen. David Petraeus' Capitol Hill testimony last week on U.S. strategy in Iraq focused primarily on troop levels, withdrawal dates and whether Bush's so-called troop surge was succeeding. But widely overlooked was Petraeus' sales pitch to lawmakers for one initiative he said will help save the war-torn country: massive arms sales from the U.S. government to Iraq.

"Iraq is becoming one of the United States' larger foreign military sales customers," Petraeus told the Senate Armed Services Committee on Sept. 11, noting that Iraq has inked deals to buy $1.6 billion in arms from the U.S., with the "possibility of up to $1.8 billion more." Data obtained by Salon shows the arms sales could rise far higher than even the amount the general suggested last week.

Petraeus said that the arms sales are an important part of the initiative to keep the Iraqis "rapidly expanding their security forces." But Petraeus himself presided over an arms debacle in Iraq in 2004 and 2005 in which nearly 200,000 weapons went missing. And while U.S. arms might help the Iraqi security forces "stand up" in the short term, experts warn that the U.S. military could easily lose control over what may follow. Some fear a war zone flooded with weapons that could be turned on U.S. soldiers, or supply huge firepower for a full-blown civil war.

The Pentagon confirmed that this fiscal year, the United States has finalized $1.6 billion in arms sales to Iraq, placing the country in an elite club of weapons buyers. For example, in recent one-year periods Saudi Arabia bought $800 million and Egypt bought $1 billion in arms from the U.S., while Pakistan spent $3.5 billion, including the purchase of jet fighters. "This would put [Iraq] right up there with the top handful of arms buyers," said William Hartung, a weapons proliferation expert at the New America Foundation.

In fact, the numbers Petraeus presented on Iraq were the tip of the iceberg. According to data obtained by Salon from the Defense Security Cooperation Agency at the Pentagon, which manages the arms sales, the military has alerted Congress to up to $4.3 billion in arms sales that have been under discussion since at least 2006 between the U.S. and Iraqi governments.

The arms deals come as the U.S. has shifted strategy to enlist Sunnis in western Iraq -- some of them former insurgents -- into all-Sunni units of the Iraqi security forces. The fear is that these newly trained and armed units will ultimately turn against the Shiite-dominated central government or against U.S. forces again. "I think this is kind of crazy," Hartung said about the arms sales. "Now we are making deals with some of these Sunni groups. Well, what if they turn around and go back to being insurgents after we have built them up? I think the danger of these arms being misused, even in the short term, is fairly high."


In the 1980's, we armed the Afghan mujahadeen against the Soviets, and thus created what became Al-Qaeda. Now we don't even have that much caution. One of the problems with a president who doesn't know the difference between Sunni and Shi'ite is that you end up iin a situation where the "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" doctrine can change on a moment-by-moment basis.

I wonder how many of even the most rabid 28-percenters want their tax dollars paying for arms for people who have killed American soldiers.

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