Editorial: Our enemy, our weapons

Tuesday, Aug. 7, 2007 | 7:03 a.m.

US. military branches all have strict accounting procedures when issuing personal weapons and ammunition to their own members, but there was nothing strict about how Iraqi security forces were armed.

About 190,000 rifles and pistols issued by the U.S. military to Iraqis between 2004 and early this year are missing, according to a new report by the Government Accountability Office.

Listed as missing are about 110,000 AK-47 assault rifles and 80,000 pistols - which amount to one-third of all weapons issued to Iraqi military trainees during that time.

The sense now is that many of those weapons are in the hands of insurgents. One tactic they use is to direct small-arms fire at U.S. convoys, forcing them to veer in the direction of roadside bombs.

Reporting Monday on the missing weapons, The Washington Post noted that the lax accounting occurred mostly in the years 2004 and 2005, the period in which Gen. David Petraeus, who now commands all U.S. forces in Iraq, was in charge of training Iraqi forces.

This is significant only because it shows the gaps in high-level planning that have characterized the war in Iraq from the beginning. Petraeus' reputation is that of a top-flight commander, yet even he could not overcome the problems ensuing from the Bush administration's "invade first, deal with problems later" approach to the war.

Before the invasion, there was no talk of a massive U.S. effort to train an all-new Iraqi security force, largely because Pentagon planners failed to foresee a wide-scale insurgency. Then-Secretary of State Colin Powell's 2002 warning - "You break it, you own it" - was ignored.

After the initial reasons for going to war - weapons of mass destruction and Iraqi collaboration with al-Qaida - fell through, and the inevitable insurgency began, suddenly the mission changed to converting Iraq into a U.S.-friendly democracy, and a new theme emerged: "When Iraqi forces stand up, U.S. forces will stand down."

So Iraqi forces had to be quickly assembled and armed, before their loyalties could be confirmed and before accountability standards for the weapons they were issued could be established.

We can only hope that the Pentagon, now under Defense Secretary Robert Gates, has learned from its mistakes.