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February 12, 2007

Arming the Iraqi insurgency - who's responsible?

The Bush administration is currently emphasising that weapons are coming from Iran to Iraqi insurgents, and arguing that this is happening directly with Iranian government approval. In itself, this is pretty feasible, although it may be hard to establish any clear chain of evidence (as the US and Pakistan knew, when supplying Afghan anti-Marxist insurgents, it is often possible to do this while maintaining at least some veneer of deniability). Also, bearing in mind that there's now (hard to verify) evidence that the Iraqi insurgency is self-financing, there's a real possibility that many of these arms were bought on the open/black market.

If the US seeks to use the Iranian supply of weapons to Iraq as a 'justification' for military action, they face an additional problem. Weapons were "FREE FOR THE TAKING" after the invasion of Iraq:US military commanders in autumn 2003 estimated that Iraqi military sites contained 650,000 to one 1,000,000 tons of various types of munitions", and these sites were not adequately secured. However many weapons are smuggled across the porous Iran/Iraq border, it seems incredible that anyone could have smuggled across anything like the quantities of munitions which Operation Iraqi Freedom made pretty freely available to all takers in Iraq.

Posted by jon_mendel at February 12, 2007 11:55 PM

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