An OUNCE of PREVENTION
(or) LOOTED
HOPES
by Michael Hammerschlag
There has been much commotion over the lack of armor on Iraq vehicles and vests, but that’s always been a trade-off: if you reinforce a HUMV enough to survive an RPG strike, you may make it too heavy to accelerate enough to avoid getting hit, and full body armor suits are great except when 120° temperatures causes the soldier to collapse from heat prostration. The far more egregious outrage is why hundreds of thousands of tons of ordnance were allowed to be looted by insurgents in the first place.
A
breathtaking 250,000 tons of heavy ordnance (out of 650,000 tons total):
aircraft bombs, artillery and tank shells, mortars, rockets were allowed to be
looted by our undermanned army in the 4-30 weeks after the invasion through
gross negligence at the top- equavalent to 1 million 500 lb bombs.
At ten 500 lb. roadside mines or market closeouts a day, that's enough
for 274 years of attacks.
---"During the
fall of 2003, what you would see was Iraqis going in at night, individually and
in trucks," US weapons inspector David Kay told U.S. News. "They
would pull ordnances out and drive off." Security was so bad after Saddam
Hussein's regime fell, Kay recalled, that his team was often shot at by
insurgents when they went to inspect the sites: "There were just not
enough boots on the ground, and the military didn't give it a high enough
priority to stop the looting. Tens of thousands of tons of ammunition were
being looted, and that is what is fueling the insurgency." -US News+WR
David BeBatto, a
Military counterintelligence officer in charge of hunting the deck-of-cards top
Baathists, stationed at the massive Camp Annaconda 50 miles north of Baghdad,
found a 5 sq. mile ammo dump under 2 miles south of the camp in April
2003 “littered with anti-aircraft missiles, land mines, rocket-propelled
grenades, plastic
explosives” in dozens of bunkers. He reported it again and again in written
reports to his battalion commander Lt. Col. Timothy Ryan‡, even giving him a
tour of the dump. “Local Iraqis told us- ‘these guys’ – and they would point to
looters in the distance- ‘are fedayeen. They’re going to take this and
make it into bombs and use it against you,’ ” he said in an interview. Nothing
was done. “We had enough people.. if we had placed 4,5,6 guys at the
main entry to that facility, that would have been enough!.. Every time I went
back there, there was less.”
2 other intelligence
agents also reported seeing that and many unsecured ammo dumps all over Iraq
bursting with deadly material- all of which were massively looted. “Bottom line
is they ignored it- (because of) a lack of people, ignorance, and .. absolute
lack of planning for the occupation. Every day was a new day- you made it up as
you went along.”
When questioned about
the looting*, Donald Rumsfeld famously replied
with the blithe insolence of a drunken teenager who had crashed the family car,
“Freedom's untidy. And free people are free to commit mistakes, and to
commit crimes and do bad things…. Stuff happens.” The looting was "part of the
price" for the liberation of Iraq. Incredibly, Rumsfeld seemed to think
the looting was a finger in Saddam’s eye and a healthy release of
“pent-up feelings that may result from decades of repression.”
The First Rule
of Occupation since the Sumerians is: disarm the population,
but Rumsfeld knew better, wanting to test his faster lighter cheaper invasion
theories, and blindly convinced we would be feted as liberators. DeBatto says,
“They made a decision at the highest level- Rumsfeld- to just let it go. They
wanted not to be seen as brutal occupiers and didn’t react at all. You had
these heavily armed Americans who could have stopped anything.. yet they let
these looters take everything they wanted. We have given every weapon Saddam
stored for 30 years.. to every terrorist and 2-bit thug in the Middle East.”
Worst was the
Manhattan-sized weapons dump of Al Qaqa'a, loaded with 380 tons of HMX, RDX,
PETN high explosives, so powerful they are used in nuclear bombs, and usable to
make near undetectable IED's (no metal). The 101 Airborne Div., who swept the
area April 7-10, 2003, said they "did not receive orders to search and
secure the entire facility or search for high explosive-type munitions."
By May 27, it was stripped of all explosives by looters. Even the Tuwaitha
Nuclear Research Facility was allowed to be looted under
the noses of US troops, putting a lie to the entire WMD excuse for invasion.
The cost has been borne
by soldiers blasted by massive IED’s and car bombs, which were easily available
only because of the looting: 783 coalition deaths3 (Iraq
Coalition Casualty Count) and 2000-5000 wounded. Insurgents have destroyed
everything short of Abrams tanks with these artillery shell or air bomb IED’s,
sometimes daisy chained together or shaped to penetrate armor. IED’s now cause
the majority of US deaths in Iraq, 176 (59%) from IED and car bomb in
the last 4 months alone (May-Aug) vs. only 77 a year before. The Marines
have really suffered: this June, 24 of 28 Marine fatalities,
85%, were from IED’s and car bombs†.
Additionally, helicopter crash deaths from anti-aircraft missiles, RPG and
missile attacks on vehicles, even mortar fatalities could be largely blamed on
the unlimited looting allowed.
“It all comes back to
Rumsfeld: he tried to do the war on the cheap at the expense of the miltary,”
fumes DeBatto. “If we had contained the looting, I firmly believe, Iraqis would
have still liked us, we could have sent the vast majority of our people home,
and left a small number to train their people… Things would be very different
today.”
Rumsfeld said in the
2004 Congressional hearings on Abu Graib that, “I would
resign in a minute if I thought that I couldn't be effective.” He wasn’t- he cavalierly ignored the most basic
rules of invasion and perhaps 900 Americans have paid the ultimate price for
his arrogance and blindness. He should resign or be fired, or suffer the
endless chants of Cindy Sheehans encamped at his door, or the doorstep of his
mind. Copyright©2005
Michael Hammerschlag
* questions were about looting of Baghdad infrastructure and
Museum; deadly munitions never came up
‡Ryan’s commander
was Col. Thomas Pappas, convicted of deleriction of duty and relieved for his
part in Abu Graib abuse scandal. REFERENCES
3 includes categories “explosion”, “bomb”,
"car bomb", + "suicide car
bomb"which are also IED’s (11-11);
Grenade, RPG, mine, etc listed separately
† 490 Marine deaths as of June 3,’05; total 565 Aug 31, inc.
attached Navy, 30% of all US fatalities then (1882)
Michael Hammerschlag's commentary and articles (HAMMERNEWS.com)
have appeared in Seattle Times, Providence. Journal, Columbia Journalism
Review, Hawaii Advertiser, Capital Times, MediaChannel; and Moscow
News, Tribune, Times, and Guardian. He's been a TV reporter,
foreign correspondent, and produced documentaries. He spent 2 years in Russia
from 1991-94, while multiple wars raged in the Islamic southern republics.
hammerschlag@bigfoot.com