SURGE GENERAL IN CHARGE DURING MISSING WEAPONS FIASCO

General David Petraeus, the man with the task of reversing Iraq’s descent into chaos, was in charge of training the Iraqi army when more than 190,000 American weapons vanished from its arsenal.
While the Pentagon admits that these weapons, mostly pistols and AK 47 automatic rifles, cannot be accounted for, some observers feel it is only the tip of the iceberg. After all, less than a year ago the Pentagon acknowledged that less than 3% of the weapons issued to Iraqi units had been catalogued and filed.
This latest bad news from Iraq arrived in a report by the watchdog GAO – Government Accountability Office – in Washington. It could not have come at a worse time for the White which expects General Petraeus to provide an upbeat report on Iraq next month. According to the GAO, from 2004 to 2005, 80,000 pistols, 110,000 automatic rifles, 135,000 pieces of body armor and 115,000 have vanished. But even those figures could turn out to be higher, considering that by September 2005, the US had given the Iraqi forces almost 190,000 AK-rifles and a similar number of pistols. The rifles had been purchased by the US in the Balkans from supplies confiscated after the Bosnian War. No mention has been made by the Pentagon about the amount of ammunition that may also be unaccounted for.
The most disturbing aspect of this whole affair is that many of the missing guns may have been used by insurgents to kill American soldiers. Another worrying dimension to the saga is how much it illustrates the untrustworthiness of an Iraqi military heavily infiltrated by Shia militias fighting US troops in Baghdad elsewhere in the country. And it is on record that an Iraqi Brigade that was stood down in 2004 later used its American-supplied weapons in battles with the US military in Fallujah.
When it comes to blame for the missing guns, Iraqi army spokesmen have been quick to point out that the US was responsible for the distribution of the weapons and therefore for their disappearance. The GAO is no less critical of the US military and blames the weapons fiasco on a failure of those in charge to see that the guns were not distributed in a “haphazard” fashion and that established rules were followed. There was, says the GAO, numerous mistakes due to incorrect manual entries.” If the GAO is right in pointing the finger of blame at those in authority then the buck stops with General David Petraeus who is now seen by President Bush as the savior of his Iraq policy. The GAO directly referred to Petraeus in its report, by talking about the commander of MNSTC-1 - Multi-National Security Transition Command 1:
“GAO found a discrepancy of at least 190,000 weapons between data reported by the former MNSTC-1 commander and the property books. Former MNSTC-1 officials stated that this lapse was due to insufficient staff and the lack of a fully operational distribution network, among other reasons.” The GAO added that as of January 2007, there were continuing problems with missing and incomplete records.
While the White House continues to portray the war in Iraq as merely a war against Al Qaeda and blames Iran and Syria for supplying weapons to insurgents, the fate of ordinary Iraqis is almost forgotten. The White House has conveniently ignored the fact that Iraq is teetering on the edge of a humanitarian crisis. Many aid groups cannot operate to feed the poor and children continue to die of malnutrition. There is also the fact that the infrastructure has never been worse and electricity and water shortages are common. Unprecedented numbers are also leaving the country and Iraq is more bitterly divided than at any time in its history. In the south, where the British are gradually withdrawing, chaos reins, yet in February former British Prime Minister, Tony Blair and Dick Cheney were portraying the southern city of Basra as a success. The reality is that the British around Basra resemble the cavalry of the Wild West. They tend to remain within a large compound close to Basra airport while mortars rein down on them. Meanwhile, Basra is being fought over by Shia militias and gangsters. Tony Blair’s successor, Gordon Brown, knows the battle for Basra was lost some time ago and is anxious to get his 4,000 remaining soldiers out of the country.
But, as in most wars truth about reality is often sacrificed on the altar of propaganda and disinformation. That appears to be how the veteran Irish journalist, Patrick Cockburn sees it. Based in Iraq and writing for the London Independent, Cockburn remained in Baghdad during the first Gulf War. He believes more lies have been told about the casualties and overall situation in Iraq than any other conflict since World War 1. He points to the Baker Hamilton Report, which confirmed there were serious flaws in US military reporting. Baker-Hamilton stated that in one day in July 2006 the US military reported 93 attacks on US and Iraqi forces when in fact US intelligence figures showed there were 1,100.
Cockburn claims that the Iraqi government has helped hide casualty figures by banning journalists from bomb scenes and by denying hospitals the right to release casualty figures. He identifies an example of a bombing in a district of Baghdad on July 26, 2007, when the Iraqi police were quoted as saying there were 25 dead and 100 wounded when in fact 92 were killed and 127 wounded.
From Cockburn’s perspective much of the disinformation began when the US military invaded Iraq and declared it was not keeping figures of the numbers of Iraqis killed by US action.
“It often describes bodies found after a US raid as belonging to local insurgents when the local Iraqi police are saying they were civilians killed by the immense firepower deployed by American forces. Almost the only time a real investigation of such killings is carried out is when the local staff of Western media outlets is among the dead,” says Cockburn.
His opinions fit into the debate about the true nature of the civilian death toll in Iraq which has ranged in estimates from 60, 000 to 500,000 or more. A similar debate rages in Afghanistan where this year it turned out that coalition forces were killing more civilians than the Taliban, a point not lost on the Afghan president, Hamid Karzai who has demanded that the US and NATO be more circumspect in the use of air and ground power.