Lifted from this morning's WSJ; for those of you who have any delusions about 'our friends' the Russians. Or, I suppose I should say, the military-industrial complex -- mafiyosi of one kind or another -- who still have a tight grip on that country ...
Saddam's Worthless Medals
By VLADIMIR SOCOR
It is by now public knowledge that Russian arms manufacturers have been supplying Iraq for years, in breach of U.N. sanctions, right down to the beginning of the U.S.-led campaign, and even during the campaign's first days. The clandestine supplies were often routed through third countries, such as Syria. Weapons systems were usually delivered in components, which were then reassembled in Iraq, sometimes with assistance of Russian technicians on-site. Some of these deliveries seemed calculated to offset technological advantages of the coalition forces, and thereby to increase the casualty rate among them.
Thus, thousands of Russian-made night-vision devices were delivered off the producer's shelf to the Iraqi army, so as to enable it to face coalition forces in night combat. Russian manufacturers also sold Kornet anti-tank guided missiles, as well as anti-tank artillery shells, to Iraq. The Kornets knocked out several U.S. Abrams battle tanks in the initial phase of the campaign.
For both military and political effect, Saddam acquired brand new GPS-jamming stations from Russia. These stations create active interference with the Global Positioning Systems, which by means of satellite signals guide U.S. planes and precision weapons to their targets. The jammer disorients pilots, and deflects "smart" munitions off their trajectories.
This not only protects Iraqi military targets, but produces collateral damage and civilian casualties, which are then exploited for propaganda purposes. GPS-jammers probably caused some of the incidents in which U.S. precision weapons strayed and struck British planes, an Iraqi bus, and fell on Turkish, Syrian, and Iranian territories. Russian and international media pounced on those incidents, before U.S. forces located and destroyed most of the jamming stations.
Saddam also received from Russia components and spare parts for Soviet-era heavy weapons, which form the bulk of the Iraqi army's inventory. These include Scud-C missiles ("al-Hussein"), surface-to-air missiles, battle tanks such as the T-72 and combat helicopters.
A considerable part of this inventory survived the first Gulf war, and required maintenance and overhaul in subsequent years. Russian dealers and their third-country proxies supplied components and parts, and occasionally even whole systems such as Mi-24 ("Hind") assault helicopters. This year, Russian manufacturers were set to supply under contract 3,000 dual-purpose trucks, designed for easy refitting as missile-launching platforms, thus ensuring Iraqi missiles' mobility and enhancing their survivability.
Such deliveries violated not only the U.N. sanctions, but also Russia's official ban on military supplies to Iraq -- a ban originally declared in 1990 by the Soviet government in accordance with U.N. resolutions in the runup to the first Gulf War -- but not strictly enforced by Russian governments since then.
More than a year ago, the Bush administration began raising this issue with Moscow confidentially. It did not go public, apparently out of concern to protect what was billed as a strategic partnership with Russia from the inevitable fallout. Then the State Department prevailed in taking America "down the U.N. path," as it was said at the time, to seek approval for disarming Saddam Hussein by force. The ensuing long ordeal in the Security Council illustrated Moscow's misuse of the U.N. system for leverage against the United States.
With Russia in a position to exercise its veto in the Security Council, the U.S. evidently felt that it could not complain publicly about Russian arms deliveries to Iraq. Thus, even as it consented to defer to the U.N.'s authority with respect to disarming Saddam Hussein, the U.S. placed itself in a weak position from which to protest against Russian clandestine supplies to Saddam's army. It was only after the start of operation Iraqi Freedom that Washington made public some of its intelligence information -- described as the "tip of the iceberg" -- on that subject.
U.S. President George W. Bush raised the issue with Russian President Vladimir Putin in their March 24 telephone conversation, and U.S. officials followed up since then. They continue citing information from U.S. intelligence sources on Russian equipment supplied to Iraq, the supply routes and the firms involved.
Some of the deliveries had long been known to the U.S.; and some, including jammers, arrived even after the start of the war. Mr. Putin and his foreign affairs and defense ministers, Igor Ivanov and Sergei Ivanov have alternately denied the facts, or claimed ignorance, or pretended that the Russian supply firms did not exist -- until U.S. officials provided the information about them.
Such denials are not credible coming from Russia, where the arms exporters are inseparably linked to the state, both through official structures and through informal ties of corruption, and where Mr. Putin himself has instituted a pervasive control of the state by the KGB's successor, the Federal Security Service. The Kremlin seems to be stonewalling U.S. requests to bring the violators to account.
Meanwhile, Aleksandr Shokhin, head of the Russian government's Commission on Military-Technical Cooperation, has spilled a few beans on the Kremlin's Web publication, Strana.ru. There, he can be seen describing the Iraq war as a good advertising opportunity for Russia on international arms markets, "if Russian equipment is performing well when facing U.S. precision weapons, or turns out to be the main reason for the Iraqi army's increased ability to resist." It has not turned out that way.
For their part, Russian investigative reporters discovered a few days ago that Generals Vladislav Achalov and Igor Maltsev -- the former deputy defense minister and former air defense chief of staff, respectively -- have been advising Iraq's military. They last visited Baghdad about a week before the start of the U.S.-led operation Iraqi Freedom, inspected military installations, and were awarded medals by Saddam for services rendered. The generals confirmed the visits and the awards. However, Russia's defense ministry has blithely denied knowledge of these retired generals' many visits to Iraq.
Moscow almost certainly fears (probably along with Paris) that U.S. forces in Iraq may discover detailed information on illicit deals with Saddam Hussein's regime, once the allies -- and a new Iraqi government -- take control of the country, and seize regime archives. This consideration may partly explain efforts by Moscow and Paris to forestall regime change in Iraq. It also accounts in part for the reported efforts by Russian intelligence services to seize certain archives in Baghdad and cart them away.
The U.S. and its allies should ask the Kremlin to bring the arms sellers to justice, and to terminate sales of Russian military equipment to rogue regimes. The victorious allies should not require Iraq's new government to repay the Saddam Hussein regime's military debts to Russia. Those are Saddam's debts, not those of the Iraqi people. The U.S. will bear a large share of the costs of Iraq's reconstruction. If it requires Iraq to pay its multi-billion-dollar military debts to Russia, the U.S. would end up financing Saddam's Russian arms purchases.
Mr. Socor is a senior fellow of the Washington-based Institute for Advanced Strategic & Political Studies.
8:29:39 AM 
|
