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U.S. guns go missing in Iraq

A new report from the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction found that the U.S. military has failed to track hundreds of thousands of weapons given to the Iraqi security forces or to provide spare parts, repair manuals and personnel to keep the weapons combat-ready. There is no excuse for such incompetence.

The report, requested by Virginia Sen. John Warner, chairman of the Armed Services Committee, states that many of the 505,093 weapons -including 9mm pistols, assault rifles, rocket-propelled grenade launchers, sniper rifles and machine guns - shipped to Iraq were not properly tracked by serial numbers and destinations.

As a result, Pentagon officials are clueless as to who wound up with the weapons. One big fear is that many of the unregistered weapons are being sold on the lucrative black market in and around Baghdad, where thousands of insurgents do much of their shopping. No one doubts that American troops have been killed by these weapons - the same ones that U.S. taxpayers have paid for believing the weapons would be used to protect our troops and Iraqi security forces rather than kill them.

A separate report, released in conjunction with the special inspector general's report, indicates that large numbers of Iraqi security forces are so poorly trained and equipped that they must depend on U.S. troops to carry out the most routine maneuvers. The report also found that several provinces, mainly in the Shiite south, are so dangerous that U.S. and coalition reconstruction personnel should be pulled out altogether.

These grim findings come just when the United States is beginning to look seriously for ways to reduce the number of U.S. troops in harm's way by handing over security responsibilities to the Iraqis.

But the gross negligence and incompetence - especially the failure to record the weapons' serial numbers - detailed in the two reports suggest that there is no reason to be optimistic that the situation in Iraq will improve without a significant shift in strategy.

[Last modified November 13, 2006, 01:33:11]