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smoking a beard, growing a pipe...,
2007-08-17 23:38:55
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adrift in a barroom, acting like a jerk and a kid...,
2007-08-19 23:54:40
you mean there's somebody in Iraq not already packing an assault rifle or four?:
The Italians have disrupted one of what is probably dozens of black market arms sales to Iraq:
...Iraqi and Italian partners haggled over shipping more than 100,000 Russian-made automatic weapons into the bloodbath of Iraq. ... $40 million dollar deal... Iraqi government officials were involved in the deal, apparently without the knowledge of the U.S. Baghdad command... Turkey and Iran complain U.S.-supplied guns are flowing from Iraq to anti-government militants on their soil. ...
By December, the Italians, having found a Bulgarian broker, were offering Russian-made goods: 50,000 AKM rifles, an improved version of the AK-47; 50,000 AKMS rifles, the same gun with folding stock; and 5,000 PKM machine guns.
In Baghdad, the Interior Ministry wouldn't discuss the AK-47 transaction on the record. But a senior ministry official, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the matter's sensitivity, acknowledged it had sought the weapons through al-Handal.
The AP notes "Some guns the U.S. bought for Iraq's police and army are unaccounted for, possibly fallen into the hands of insurgents or sectarian militias". "Some". 190,000 AK-47 assault rifles and pistols lost during General Petraeus' tenure over Operation BULL RUN * "some".
Now we just need some way to incorporate this news into our daily eight minute hates over Syrian and Iranian interference in Iraq. Perhaps we could complain that the French loving Italians are blocking Iraqi Government efforts to escalate the civil war against the Iranian supported Iraqi Government.
- This off the cuff joke of mine about the first battle of the American Civil War - implying that the US arming operations helped trigger bloody fratricidal violence in Iraq to later justify a perpetual occupation, or some such conspiracy theory - upon a brief google search, has apparently occurred to others. Namely, it has occurred to US Central Command to name an operation earlier this month in which the predominately Shi'ite Iraqi national forces face off with Sunni enclaves southeast of Baghdad.
Maybe they were inspired by this blog post from February 2006.
:: posted by buermann @ 2007-08-19 10:11:08 CST |
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