By far the largest supply of Iraqi weapons is the vast supply of discarded artillery rounds bought up by Saddam from the Russians in his war with Iran. Super saturation of artillery was Saddam's secret weapon. But in Kuwait, Desert Storm I and the last war Iraqi forces had little time or tactical advantage in consuming mass numbers of artillery rounds. So there are hundreds upon thousands upon thousands of tons of shells laying about Iraq in hundreds of ammo dumps with little or no security. The next time you see a victim of a shaped charge IED you can thank Russia for selling the round to Saddam.

I like this sort of article. I want to read more writing like this on Salon. And someone clone Greenwald.

Pretty damn good stuff when even robot-2 has to acknowledge a point.

So, why are we reading this hear and not seeing it on CNN? We all know why FoxNews won't report these items: they do not coincide with the White House party line. But why does our "Mainstream media" surpress these stories?

You wrote: "The next time you see a victim of a shaped charge IED you can thank Russia for selling the round to Saddam."

I thank those who sold the world, or at least the United States, on the Iraq war for failure to secure Saddam's weapons immediately after taking the locations where they were stored. That would have been so easy.

Please explain why you want to distract me from putting the blame where it belongs when you suggest I should blame Russia.

So don't look to me for YOUR excuses.

Look, you have all these groups arranged into militias, awaking groups, ect....

How about take that paramilitary structure......and use it to train them in something other than fighting.

Ya, I know it sounds hookey, but whatever, I've been to Iraq and am on my way back again in a hot minute, so hear me out.

Iraqs two biggest problems right now (other than bradley fighting vehicles tearing up the place, and cordon and search operations) stem from:

1) Lack of educated people to fill jobs, and no decent civil service system.

2) Too many 20 somethings who need money, and have no other thing going on except carrying a gun around…

How about train people to do stuff other than fighting, and supply them with stuff like equipment for repaving roads and taking care of power generators, instead of weapons….....it sounds crazy and all, but hay, lets see how that works out.

Not just here. This article is a summary of what we already know. This is a bad issue for trolls to try to spin, so, trolls, please just lay off. Actually support our troops, rather than just picking silly (drunken?) internet fights.

This is not some theoretical issue. The US military and the US government really have killed our own US soldiers and Marines by letting the bad guys have these weapons. Actual dead teenage Lance Corporals. Their blood is on W. Bush's and General Petraeus's heads.

New-Robot, do you drink a lot? I ask this, because when I drink, I write stupid Salon posts, and the next morning, I regret. Pick your arguey-pargey "clever" word battles more carefully. Do not debase yourself trying to spin these abominations.

So just because the shaky rpg lie falls down we can still bomb them if only we are hysterical enough to imagine we must bomb them there to avoid having to bomb them here.

If you can only get one person to believe your lie it will eventually work out if you tell enough lies. Anyone clouds lifting over the legions of the fooled again bunch or is this last 25% so invested in the program all they care about the lies is if they will fool someone new. Probably not.

C'mon, let's discuss which lie is the best lie. I like "Iraq has WMD and can launch in 45 minutes". Who wrote that crock and who believed it even in the beginning. Which lie works for you.

Conrad Elledge

As a wise man once said, when someone's "mistake" puts a dollar in his pocket, expect that person to make the same "mistake" again and again. So Petraeus hands over weapons to so-called allies who hand them over to people who use them against us, thereby creating an argument for the continued U.S. presence of U.S. forces, who hand over weapons to our so-called allies...

And, as Milo Minderbinder would say, "Everyone has a share."

The longer this goes on, the more money defense contractors make and the more cash that opportunistic officers on the scene can scoop up -- 20 billion dollars in cash unaccounted for so far and counting.

There is no doubt that Petraeus is the military-industrial complex's butt boy and that he personally, as well as his top commanders, have stashed away enough cash to keep them in fat city until kingdom come.

He's a citizen of the Republic of Halliburton in the Duchy of Blackwater.

Another sleazy shot at Gen. Patreus.

Since being put in command of US troops in Iraq, things have gotten a lot better. The surge is working despite the hopes of those who prefer to see it fail, for their political gain.

Demonstrating the existence of weapons that were sourced from places other than Iran, does not change the fact that Iran is helping militants in Iraq. This is a diversionary tactic taken by the author of this piece.

If you think Iran is incapable of such acts, read Amedinijhad's recents comments on most any topic.

The moveon.org dunces, and the Bush haters refuse to acknowledge the good that Gen. Patreus has done, and that he has done this in a very difficult situation.

Keep slamming him. I like the way it makes you look.

It's the utter incoherence of the Bush regime's Iraq "policy" that is responsible for the chaos described in the article.

Decapitate the Sunni government, install a Shiite government, then begin arming Sunni militias (and pay them to stop shooting at us) that will immediately take up armed resistance against the Shiite government the moment American troops withdraw.

And to rationalize the easily predicted failure to establish a harmonious Jeffersonian democracy in Iraq? Blame Iran.

Democrats must act NOW to prevent the lunatics in the Bush regime from further compounding the disaster they have created by attacking Iran.