Billions in US Weapons Deals for Iraq

One area of General Petraeus’s testimony in Washington that was widely overlooked by the media last week was the General’s confirmation that billions of Dollars in weapons deals are on the table for Iraq.

“Iraq is becoming one of the United States’ larger foreign military sales customers,” Petraeus told the Senate Armed Services Committee on Sept. 11, noting that Iraq has inked deals to buy $1.6 billion in arms from the U.S., with the “possibility of up to $1.8 billion more.”

Some arms experts see much larger amounts of arms deals moving forward and wonder if they are in the long term interests of the US.

Petraeus himself presided over an arms debacle in Iraq in 2004 and 2005 in which nearly 200,000 weapons went missing. U.S. arms might help the Iraqi security forces “stand up” in the short term but experts warn that the U.S. military could easily lose control over what may follow. Some fear a war zone flooded with weapons that could be turned on U.S. soldiers, or supply huge firepower for a full-blown civil war.

Most of the new arms deals are going to the Sunni tribes in Anbar province and are being used to arm Sunni only military units. While the Sunni tribal leaders have agreed to work with the US , at least for now, in chasing down al-Qaeda types, one should not forget that in the not very distance past these tribes were inflicting the greatest losses on US forces in Anbar and remain opposed to the Iraqi government in Baghdad.

Those who know Iraq well fear that in the future the US armed and trained Sunni forces may turn against the Iraqi government in a full blown civil war that the US would be right in the middle of.

At the very least the proposition that flooding a war zone with additional weapons will bring peace to the county seems to be one open to question. Of course, the war profiteers could care less. The war business in Iraq and in many other places around the globe continues to be in a raging bull market. The Bush administration and their friends at the Pentagon will certainly keep it that way.

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