Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman John Warner (R-Va.), who seems increasingly unimpressed with the Bush administration’s handling of the war in Iraq, recently asked the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction to explain the whereabouts of arms sent by the U.S. to Iraqi officials. The Inspector, Stuart Bowen, responded yesterday. The news was hardly encouraging.
The American military has not properly tracked hundreds of thousands of weapons intended for Iraqi security forces and has failed to provide spare parts, maintenance personnel or even repair manuals for most of the weapons given to the Iraqis, a federal report released Sunday has concluded. […]
The answers came Sunday from the inspector general’s office, which found major discrepancies in American military records on where thousands of 9-millimeter pistols and hundreds of assault rifles and other weapons have ended up. The American military did not even take the elementary step of recording the serial numbers of nearly half a million weapons provided to Iraqis, the inspector general found, making it impossible to track or identify any that might be in the wrong hands.
Exactly where untracked weapons could end up — and whether some have been used against American soldiers — were not examined in the report, although black-market arms dealers thrive on the streets of Baghdad, and official Iraq Army and police uniforms can easily be purchased as well, presumably because government shipments are intercepted or otherwise corrupted.
It’s hard to believe, but the Inspector General’s office also learned that U.S. officials not only lost track of a vast supply of weapons, some of which insurgents may now be using against American troops, but also neglected to give Iraqis spare parts and manuals for the weapons that did end up in the right hands.
Wait, it gets worse.
As the NYT noted, Warner also asked Bowen’s office to “examine whether Iraqi security forces were developing a logistics operation capable of sustaining the hundreds of thousands of troops and police officers the American military says it has trained.” As it turns out, this is going about as well as keeping track of U.S. weapons.
The inspector general’s office, led by Stuart W. Bowen Jr., also a Republican, responded to Mr. Warner’s query about the Iraqi Army’s logistical capabilities with another report released at the same time, concluding that Iraqi security forces still depended heavily on the Americans for the operations that sustain a modern army: deliveries of fuel and ammunition, troop transport, health care and maintenance.
Mr. Bowen found that the American military was not able to say how many Iraqi logistics personnel it had trained — in this case because, the military told the inspector general, a computer network crash erased records.
(Bangs head on desk)
But getting back to the untracked missing weapons, we gave over 500,000 weapons to the Ministries of Interior and Defense over the last several years. Of those, serial numbers for only 12,128 were properly recorded. For those keeping score at home, that means 97.6% of the weapons went unrecorded.
And what kind of weapons are we talking about here? Rocket-propelled grenade launchers, assault rifles, machine guns, shotguns, semiautomatic pistols and sniper rifles. And what’s the explanation?
There are standard regulations for registering military weaponry in that way, governed by the Department of Defense small-arms serialization program. The inspector general’s report said that when asked why so many weapons went to Iraq with no record of serial numbers, American military officials in Baghdad replied that they did not believe the regulations applied to them. (emphasis added)
When it comes to Bush administration officials executing a war, they never seem to think the rules apply to them. Remind me again why the Bush gang still believes it’s credible on national security?
There’s some irony, I suppose, in the fact that we went to Iraq to find Saddam’s weapons that weren’t there, and ended up losing track of our own weapons that were there.