When the Washington Post reported that the Pentagon has lost more than 100,000 Ak-47s in Iraq, along with a number of other combat items, the number rang a bell. A little more than two years ago, at the same time as we were tossing guns into the void, then defense-secretary Donald Rumsfeld was fretting publicly about Venezuela’s plans to buy 100,000 AK-47s. “I just hope that, personally hope, that it doesn’t happen… I can’t imagine that if it did happen, that it would be good for the hemisphere.”

Hugo Chavez did eventually buy his rifles; it’s a fair bet he kept better track of them than we did ours.

To be fair, we should note that even if the US knew exactly who got the missing weapons in Iraq — which were distributed by General David Patraeus, then in charge of training Iraqi forces and now in charge of attempting to control them — the chances are quite good that they would still have ended up in the hands of people using them against our troops. But good accounting might have prevented us from giving new rifles to Iraqi troops who had already received and misappropriated them. Considering that the weapons unaccounted for represent more than half of the total number Petraeus dispensed, and that we’ve continued to supply new weapons in the two years since the audit period, it seems likely that most of the ones that fell off the back of the truck eventually wound up in the hands of insurgents or militias. Probably not good for that particular slice of the hemisphere. Damn that Hugo Chavez.

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