We now have a count of the weapons lost by the U.S. to insurgent forces in Iraq, far more than could ever be supplied by Iran, or Syria, or Saudi Arabia, or all of them combined.
190,000 US weapons feared missing in Iraq
But it gets better, now the Iraqi puppet regime in Baghdad is buying weapons from the Mafia!
US loss of control over the flood of weapons into Iraq was highlighted again yesterday when it emerged that Italian anti-Mafia investigators had uncovered an alleged shipment of 105,000 rifles of which the American high command was unaware.
But they are just following in their masters footsteps.
Perhaps Joseph Heller's Catch 22 should be mandatory reading for Congress and the Pentagon.
It was classic bureaucratic bungling, the Government Accountability Office concluded last month in a report criticizing the Pentagon's failure to keep proper records and track weapons flows. But there may have been another factor -- the government's dangerous and bumbling use of bad guys.
Consider the case of one particular bad guy, Viktor Bout -- a stout, canny Russian air transporter who also happens to be the world's most notorious arms dealer.
Colonel Cargill was a forceful, ruddy man. Before the war, he had been an alert, hard-hitting, aggressive marketing executive. He was a very bad marketing executive. Colonel Cargill was so bad a marketing executive that his services were much sought after by firms eager to establish losses for tax purposes. Throughout the civilized world, from Battery Park to Fulton Street, he was known as a dependable man for a fast tax write-off. His prices were high, for failure often did not come easily. He had to start at the top and work himself down, and with sympathetic friends in Washington, losing money was no simple matter. It took months of hard work and careful misplanning. A person misplaced, disorganized, miscalculated, overlooked everything and opened every loophole, and just when he thought he had it made, the government gave him a lake or a forest or an oilfield and spoiled everything. Even with such handicaps, Colonel Cargill could be relied on to run the most prosperous enterprise into the ground. He was a self-made man who owed his lack of success to nobody.Since this kind of screw up is an American Military tradition. Just business as usual.
I explained about the 17- and 18-year-old medics in Vietnam carrying M&Ms to give to soldiers too severely wounded even for morphine, whispering that the candies were for the pain while they waited for the choppers.Find blog posts, photos, events and more off-site about:
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