Tuesday, May 03, 2005

Well, here's a fun story from The Washington Post:

Insurgents Using U.S. Techniques

In 1965, the U.S. Army published a detailed manual on how to build and hide booby traps, complete with detailed diagrams illustrating various means of wiring detonators to explosives, and advising on the best locations for concealing the deadly bombs along roadways and elsewhere.

Two decades later, the Iraqi military issued its troops an Arabic version of the same manual, copying not only the wording but also many of the drawings. Dated March 1987 and stamped "confidential," the manual includes a message from Saddam Hussein, then Iraq's supreme ruler, underscoring the importance of perpetual learning.

...one senior civilian official here ... estimated that 10 percent of the bombs planted in Iraq use the pressure-detonation techniques detailed in the U.S.-conceived document....


(You can see before and after versions of a sample page here.)

Apparently, there's a perfectly rational explanation for this:

W. Patrick Lang, a former Defense Intelligence Agency expert on the Middle East, said the existence of the Iraqi version is not surprising.

"I'll tell you how they got it," he said. "They had students in our military service schools until the 1967 Arab-Israeli War, and they'd just take the manuals with them."


(Although it seems to me that Saddam might have just asked his buddies in the U.S. government to provide a few copies back when he was our anti-Iranian pal.)

Some think the glass is half full:

"The upside is, if you know what their training manual is, then you know what you're up against," said one senior civilian official here. "Having them use our tactics, techniques and procedures isn't necessarily a bad thing."

Which brings me to a tangential detail I particularly enjoy:

A copy of the Iraqi manual was made available to The Washington Post by Tim Brown, a senior fellow at GlobalSecurity.org, who said he found it several years ago while rummaging around a military surplus store in Los Angeles. He recognized its similarity to the U.S. manual, which he said he had obtained years earlier at a gun show.

I draw your attention to this because I think it's possible that the next president of the United States could be a Democrat -- maybe even the hated Hillary Clinton. If so, I expect a few of our current culture warriors to grow a wee bit more violent. But, hey, I guess the upside is, we might know what one of their training manuals is, so we'll know some of what we're up against.

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