Russell's Blog

While I listened to Petraeus and Crocker tiptoe clumsily around perjury, I couldn't help but wonder how many people will take them at their word that the level of violence is declining. I find it difficult to understand how the level of violence is decreasing when the rate of killing has been increasing. I guess it must depend on how you count the bodies. Evidently, ordinary muggers shoot people in the face, and death squads shoot people in the back of the head. Accepting, for a moment, this ridiculous criterion for distinguishing muggings from sectarian killings as reasonable, it seems very weird that we don't count muggings as violence.

Ambassador Crocker, for his part, repeated the assertion that Iran is supplying the insurgency with sophisticated weapons, particularly explosively formed penetrators. If you will direct your attention to the photograph below, from Wikipedia :

This is a sophisticated weapon that exploits some very tricky hydrodynamics. It is also improvised from an ordinary copper pipe. The penetrator (the bowl shaped part) looks like it was turned out on a lathe, and that the machinist was either not very skillful or not very concerned with quality. Note the disk-shaped depression in the center where the lathe spindle was attached. The penetrator appears to be soldered to the pipe with plumbing solder.

I don't think the insurgency needs anyone's help to build these. The hardest part would be obtaining the explosive material. Who is supplying the insurgency with explosives? The simplest explanation is that they helped themselves to the weapons caches we left unguarded at the beginning of the war. How many improvised explosively formed penetrators could you make with 377 tons of high explosives?

Maybe Iran isn't being very helpful when it comes to American interests in Iraq. After all, why should they? I have no doubt that Iran's leadership would be delighted to see things go as badly for America as possible in Iraq and elsewhere. However, it's not as if Iran actually has to do anything to make Iraq a disaster for America. The fact that they don't like us is not in itself a very good reason for them to arm the insurgents. Practically any government in Iraq is likely to be friendly with Iran. Iran actually has a lot of good reasons to want the insurgency to stop.

If I were Mr. Ahmadinejad, I would just sit on my hands. At most, I would give some political support to Iraqis who might be friendly to Iran should they gain or keep power. But weapons? Why bother when the insurgents have already looted all the weapons they could ever want? It would be redundant and unnecessary.

Like most Americans, Mr. Crocker knows that we've either lost or that we're loosing. What sets him apart from the rest of us is that Americans are grown up enough to accept responsibility for the bad outcome of this conflict, and Mr. Crocker would rather blame it on someone else.