Aohell

I Know Where the Missing Iraqi Weapons Are

190,000 missing weapons in Iraq, go the headlines, not to mention 135,000 missing body armor pieces and 115,000 missing helmets. And I know where they are.

No, I can't go get them, but that's just the way it goes. Anyway, the weapons are in the hands of people who should not have gotten them in the first place: insurgents, terrorists, and criminals. OK, so you're saying, "no duh!" Fair enough. But how they got there is the real story. They could have gotten there from two different flows.

One flow would be from infiltrators in the Iraqi forces. An insurgent, terrorist, or criminal shows up to work one day and grabs a stack of guns when nobody's looking. That's the easiest way to do it. If anyone asks questions, quit and go back to your insurgent, terrorist, or criminal job and let someone else infiltrate.

The second flow would be corruption among those who handle the weapons. They need something the insurgents, terrorists, or criminals got, probably drugs or prostitution, but most likely drugs. This sort of thing happened all the time in Vietnam and Afghanistan and it's not limited to the US forces.

Of course, these would be the unaccounted losses explained. I'd want to take a closer look at the losses that are properly accounted for. In World War 2, Ukrainian resistance fighters would join the Nazi SS division Galizien and then go into battle against the Russians. They'd report massive casualties. In reality, they were faking their death numbers to cover for guys who left that division after getting training and equipment from the Germans. Those "deaths" would free up more slots in the division for Ukrainian resistance fighters and it made that unit look like it had lots of heavy fighting. It did, but nowhere as fierce as reported. Similar things can happen in Iraq.

Then there's the grunt on the field. He wants something the insurgents, terrorists, or criminals have and is willing to trade his gun for that thing. He finds a way to have his gun properly "broken down" so he can get a replacement and the "defective" weapon never gets back for repairs. Maybe it's unaccounted or maybe the accounting is just crapulent at times in the chaos of the front line clerk's offices. But then, the guns wind up in the hands of the people he's fighting.

A veteran of the Afghan War, the Russian one, wrote that when the enemy is shooting at you with your own weapons, your side has lost. We can now confirm that the Iraqis are shooting at us with our own weapons.

Why Not Walkout?

The United States is coming up on the anniversary of the pro-immigration demonstration marches.

Schools everywhere are bracing for the possibility of a repeat of last year's student walkouts. They're threatening students with disciplinary action should they leave school for political purposes.

They're doing it so they can keep their average daily attendance, or ADA up. ADA is included in the formula for school funding. Should all the Hispanic kids take off for three days, the schools stand to lose some major cash.

This means those Hispanic kids have power. Lots of it. By walking out, they may get some suspensions, but the school system gets whacked. What's more, the Hispanic kids in Texas have an easy countermeasure: If the schools discipline them for walking out, they can simply refuse to take the TAKS test.

If the entire Hispanic subpopulation fails the TAKS test, every school in the state will be found non-performing and will come under stricter state supervision. Students can't be disciplined for doing poorly on a test, especially should such discipline be targeting a specific minority subpopulation.

I think students all over Texas should protest the TAKS test by refusing to take it and breaking the system from within, but, hey, that's just me. If students refuse to be treated like cattle with numbers, maybe then we could see some real school reform. We could give the kids what they want, and then they wouldn't have a reason to walk out of schools.

Head 'Em Up, Move 'Em Out

In a move that's sure to open up a whole can of worms in Kurdistan, the Iraqi government has made a decision to do a little ethnic cleansing in Kirkuk. Non-Kurds who moved to Kirkuk after 1957 and their descendants are supposed to hit the road and not come back no more, no more, no more. Each family so moved gets $25,000 in US dollars as compensation.

Oh goody. Kick me out of my house and send me down south with $25 grand. Should I pre-arrange for a kidnapper to avoid the rush? Those thoughts have to be going through the potentially displaced people. Those, or something more like, "Over my cold dead body." Either way, I don't see good things coming from this.

Kirkuk sits on 2% of the world's oil reserves, which adds to the tension of a land dispute. This is Iraq, as well, where violence seems to be the order of the day, not law and order. This is where Iraq can really plunge into hell. It's the Titanic right now. If Kirkuk flares into violence, Iraq will become the Lusitania.

Darfur in South America

The worst refugee crisis outside of Africa is Colombia, where forty years of constant civil war and narcotrafficking has displaced millions of people from the interior to coastal towns. Indegenous people and Afro-Colombians, the people on the lowest end of the social ladder, are the ones hardest hit, of course. More than 3 million of them are looking for new homes in crowded, unfriendly cities.

The refugees take fire from police, paramilitaries, and leftist rebels, either as targets of violence or as bystanders in the general melee that passes for Colombia. In an economy where the narcotics trade is king, they have no other option but to bow down and accept their fate. Colombia's got the world's highest murder rate with many of the fallen drawn from poor people who tried to stand up to the drug dealers.

To help alleviate the situation, the Colombian government is paying off the paramilitaries and leftists with massive benefits packages. Most of these retired soldiers become full-time civilian drug dealers. The poor of Colombia wonder how in the world this is supposed to benefit them.

When the LRA Ain't Happy, Ain't Nobody Happy

The leader of the Lord's Resistance Army, Joseph Kony, has had it with negotiations in Sudan. If Uganda can't find another place to negotiate with him, the 20-year-old war between the LRA and the Ugandan government will continue. This war has it all, too. Mutilations, tortures, rapes, child soldiers, child prostitutes, murdered foreign aid workers. Why should all the excitement be in Iraq? The LRA is there to show that there are crackpot killers leading mass movements all around the world.

How crackpot are these guys? Well, they've got no hope of winning, yet they insist they're gonna invade Uganda and kick some serious butt. It's more likely they'll hack and slaughter a lot of civilians and then run when the army shows up. They're brutal bandits, and it's a damn shame someone gave them enough support to buy guns. They've been supported by the Sudanese government in Khartoum against the Ugandan government, but that was when Uganda supported the southern resistance to the Khartoum government. Since those factions patched up their differences, the LRA has been on the outs as far as getting supporters.

Don't worry about them, though. Africa's messed up enough, there's bound to be some other conflict erupt somewhere, probably the Congo, that will result in some faction there wanting to support the LRA against Uganda, seeing as how Uganda likes to pick sides in regional conflicts. Until then, who needs Idi Amin when you've got Joseph Kony?