Iranian Arms Update
| Mon Nov. 17, 2008 11:36 AM PST
IRANIAN ARMS UPDATE....Gareth Porter reports on the findings of Task Force Troy, which was set up earlier this year to look for evidence of Iranian-made weapons in Iraq:
According to the data compiled by the task force, and made available to an academic research project last July, only 70 weapons believed to have been manufactured in Iran had been found in post-invasion weapons caches between mid-February and the second week in April. And those weapons represented only 17 percent of the weapons found in caches that had any Iranian weapons in them during that period.
....The caches that included Iranian weapons [] represented just 2 percent of all caches found. That means Iranian-made weapons were a fraction of one percent of the total weapons found in Shi'a militia caches during that period.
To be exact, Iranian weapons accounted for 0.36% of all weapons found during the six-week period examined by the task force. What's more, the task force also looked at large caches of supposedly Iranian weapons uncovered in Basra and Karbala during April and May and concluded that they weren't Iranian after all. Cernig provides more:
Left out of the list of Iranian-made weaponry were 350 armour-piercing explosively formed penetrators (EFPs) found in Iraqi weapons caches. Despite the lurid claims of US officials, the task group couldn't ascribe an Iranian origin to a single one. Which along with press reports about finding EFP manufactories inside Iraq explains why, since mid-Summer, we've heard nothing about Iranian-made EFPs whereas before official reports and statements were full of them.
....Iranian equipment is less reliable and more expensive than Eastern Block materiel that flooded the region after the 2003 invasion — something which a certain imprisoned international arms dealer, ex-CIA and ex-US military contractor and supplier to despots and terrorists, Viktor Bout, may well know a fair bit about. It's a buyer's market and the Iranians are seeing market forces exclude their produce, with the exception of simple artillery rockets. They're more expensive than the Pakistani arms bazaar's copies coming down the old Silk Road routes and far less effective than easily available and comparitively-priced black market US weapons too.
There's no question that Iran has substantial interests, both political and military, in Iraq, and has been assisting various armed groups there over the past few years (some of them allied with Maliki and the U.S. government). But evidence is evidence, and the evidence that they've been providing anything more than token amounts of weaponry to Iraqi fighters is very thin indeed. It's time to move on to some other bugaboo.
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Comments
I just read about this in an article liked from guerilla news network. May have been the same article. I'm not surprised (is anybody else?). At the time they're stirring up a cloud of fear around the prospect of an Iranian bomb, huge amounts of Iranian made arms are making their way into the hands of Iraqi militias. I didn't buy it, like I didn't buy Saddam possessing nukes.
I may be thick about this, but isn't the question of whether the materiel is produced in Iran a distinct question from whether Iran is providing Iraqis with weapons? Is there some reason that a country would only send locally-made weapons to other groups, rather than just shipping them weapons that are produced elsewhere? Is there some sort of barrier to Iran importing weapons from other countries that I don't know about?
Sorry if I'm being dense, but I honestly don't know. Obviously it would be great to find a smoking gun that proves Iran is making the stuff, but it seems at least plausible that they would be smart enough to hand out foreign weapons.
"There's no question that Iran has substantial interests, both political and military, in Iraq, and has been assisting various armed groups there over the past few years"
Assisting various armed groups there, how? The evidence of this is, where? Neo-con/liberal hawk think tanks? The US govt/military? NYT reporters?
Respectfully, Mr. Drum, I believe this is where your middle-of-the-road nature works against you (an otherwise admirable quality in a pundit). It would be very easy to find a post on Washington Monthly where you're saying, "of course, we all know Iran is supplying some weapons to Iraq, blah, blah, etc."
And before that, "of course, everyone knows that foreigners are streaming over the borders into Iraq from Syria, or Iran, or Saudi Arabia."
Of, "of course, we all know Saddam is probably working feverishly on WMDs"....
"of course, we all know al-Qaeda is now one of our main enemies in Iraq"...
You get the point. Sometimes there really is no there there. It's gotta be hard to believe, and no one wants to be a wingnut (and the foreign policy punditland is dominated by hawks).... but, when the story is helpful to a given group's narrative, and the info is not independently verifiable, hasn't it been proven, enough, that, well...
If George Bush says there are weapons of mass destruction-there are weapons of mass destruction. Anyone questioning this logic is UnAmerican and not Supporting the Troops! There is no hidden agenda-Cheney is not taking 8.8 million to the bank on his Defense Contracts and the Pentagon has not had an unlimited Military Budget for 8 years....Please get your facts straight by asking the Whitehouse what the facts are. They are the only ones that know!
Please get your facts straight by asking the Whitehouse what the facts are
...until Jan 20th, at which point all White House pronouncements must be regarded with the utmost skepticism, including questioning the motives of any and all White House personnel and employment of the darkest possible speculation about what they really mean in any statement they make (thus requiring some GOP hack be present to provide "balance" and "context").
Submitted by Matthew (not verified) on Mon Nov. 17, 2008 3:21 PM PST.
What, you aren't willing to go to war with Iran over this 0.36% outrage? What more do you need? .46? .56? A percent? You're just lucky the surge scared all the Iranian weapons away. 7 months ago that shit was hitting 2%.
Ruck makes a good point. Maybe there's enough weaponry just sloshing around in Iraq to arm all the bad guys.
If not, it's coming from somewere. That it isn't manufactured in Iran doesn't say much about what role they might be playing here.
Of course, that our government would actually muddy this point is beyond stupid, but then that's par for the course in this administration.
Larry and Ruck,
180,000 US bought and provided AK47s went missing in Iraq in 2004/05. And about 40,000 pistols. That's a sizeable chunk of armament right there. About $42 million and 400 + tons, in fact.
But if we're talking about re-exporting imports, in a region with a flourishing black market, 3,000 year old smuggling routes and porous borders, why theorise Iranian government involvement at all. Why can't the Occam's razor explanation by private enterprise, perhaps even involving some Iranian (and Syrian, Pakistan, Lebanese, Ukraiian, American, British etc etc) entrepreneurs?
Regards, C
PS Thanks for the hat tip Kevin.
It's fairly accepted now that Iran is supporting groups inside Iraq that we don't like (Sadr). After all, Iraq is next door to them and it only makes sense. They're also supporting groups in Iraq that we DO like (Badr Organization, SCIRI/SIIC, Dawa). Shoot, even the Kurds are pro-Iranian.
Iran doesn't need to send Iranian arms in. They're smarter than that. Why leave your fingerpints? They've been supporting groups like Hezbollah and dodging arms embargoes for almost three decades now and have gotten pretty good at it. America had trenchcoat types working with middlemen to get guns to the mujahadeen, what's the difference?
Not that it matters. It'd be a shock if Iran WASN'T involved in what was going on with their neighbor. But I don't get the FoxNews outrage on Iranian arms, other than another bogeyman evildoer bad guy.
>Why can't the Occam's razor explanation by private enterprise, perhaps even involving some Iranian (and Syrian, Pakistan, Lebanese, Ukraiian, American, British etc etc) entrepreneurs?
Bingo. Look, Detroit has a gun violence problem. The guns are not made in Detroit, or even Michigan. Does that mean that, say, North Carolina is at "war" with Michigan?
No, there are people making guns for profit in North Carolina. To make these profits they want to sell them to dealers, and do not care what the dealers do with them. The dealers want to make money, and that is again best done but not caring about what their customers do with the guns.
No government involved can really do anything about this.
Funny how conservatives over and over again reveal that they know jack about capitalism.
crack, that's pretty much what they're doing exactly. Except they're not throwing cash and guns at every johnny-come-lately like we and the Sauds did: they know their people (again, many of Iraq's political parties were formed or lived in exile in Iran for two decades). With obvious nods related to what Anonymous briefly touched on, which is a shit ton of US money and arms went missing early on, not to mention all the weapons caches strewn willy-nilly all over the place at the start of the invasion nobody thought to secure.
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