It’s bad when 377 tons of deadly explosives go missing in Iraq. It seems just about as bad when we can’t find thousands of missile antiaircraft missiles, either.
Several thousand shoulder-fired missiles — the kind that could be used to shoot down aircraft — are missing in Iraq, and their disappearance has prompted U.S. military and intelligence analysts to increase sharply their estimate of the number of such weapons that may be at large, administration officials said yesterday.
Some U.S. analysts figure that as many as 4,000 surface-to-air missiles once under the control of Saddam Hussein’s government remain unaccounted for. That would raise the number of such missiles outside government hands worldwide to about 6,000.
Let’s look at this from two angles. One, this is extraordinarily bad news because these are extremely dangerous weapons.
Known technically as Man-Portable Air Defense Systems, or MANPADS, such missiles are in some ways an ideal weapon for the al Qaedas of the world. They are far more powerful than most small arms, and can strike from a distance, enabling would-be terrorists to inflict great damage at minimal risk. Small and light at about 35 pounds, they’re easily smuggled. (With 20,000 uninspected cargo containers coming into U.S. ports every day, and fairly porous land borders, says Jenkins, “How difficult can it be for something that fits in a golf bag?”) Nor are such weapons hard to find. The world’s arsenals boast an estimated 500,000, from American Stingers to Russian Strelas; 5,000 to 10,000 of these are unaccounted for, including between 300 and 600 American-made Stingers delivered by the CIA to Afghan mujaheddin in the 1980s. (When the Soviet-Afghan war ended in 1989, the CIA tried to buy some of them back, but only with limited success.)
And, as we now know, Saddam had several thousand of them, which we’ve since lost track of.
Which leads me to the other angle: how we came to learn of this news.
The Post report said “administration officials” told reporters of the missing antiaircraft missiles on Friday afternoon. Hmm, Friday afternoon…what special significance does that have? Of right, that’s when the White House releases information it wants to have buried in Saturday’s widely-unread paper.
As the Washington Monthly’s Paul Glastris noted:
Note that we are hearing about this now, after the election, from unnamed government officials talking on Friday, so as to bury the news in the Saturday papers. This is hardly surprising, because the news is very, very worrying.
Did the White House stunt work? For the most part. The information was relegated to Saturday’s papers where it’s more likely to be missed. Some major papers, including the LA Times and the Chicago Tribune, didn’t run stories about the missing missiles at all, while the Washington Post ran an item deep inside the paper on page A24. Only the NY Times got it right, running a story on its front page on Saturday.
Not that it mattered. The Sunday shows ignored the story and there’s been no follow up. As long as the Bush White House knows their manipulation of the press works, it’ll keep happening.