Iraqis don’t need IEDs from Iran, but Bush and Cheney do

Hardly a day goes by when we don’t hear that Iran is supplying sophisticated IEDs — improvised explosive devices — to Iraqi insurgents. No one doubts that the Iranian government is perfectly willing to do whatever they think will advance their interests, including arming and otherwise supporting their allies in Iraq, but the story has holes.

Most of the IEDs ascribed to Iran are deployed in areas controlled by their enemies, and while the primary targets are U.S. forces, many target Iraqi government forces as well, which is to say, Iran’s allies. That doesn’t make a great deal of sense in terms of Iranian self-interest. The ideal near term situation for Iran is probably one in which the Shiite-led Iraqi government consolidates power while insurgents continue to keep the U.S military, and U.S. officials, preoccupied to an extent that makes an attack on Iran even more stupid than it inherently is. Providing IEDs to Sunni and Baathist insurgents would do more harm than good, as would being definitively tied to attacks on U.S. troops.

More to the point, none of the sides in Iraq’s war need help from Iran on IEDs. Making the devices that U.S. officials insist must be coming from Iran requires a design, a machine shop and machinists, and some very widely available materials (copper, pvc piping, garage door openers, etc). All of these things, including the design expertise, can be found in Iraq. Why? Because the oil industry is a large, long-time consumer of shaped charges similar to those now being used as roadside bombs in Iraq.

One reason the IEDs ascribed to Iran are usually referred to as “sophisticated” is that they’re generally not cobbled together from the thousands of tons of Saddam-era munitions that the U.S. left unsecured during the invasion and early years of the occupation and that were the staple of previous roadside bomb incarnations; instead, they use efficient very high explosives (VHE) such as RDX.

The shaped charges used in oil wells, for instance, can require as little as an ounce of RDX to punch through the well shaft lining and the surrounding rock. As luck would have it, during the invasion the U.S. failed to secure about 350 tons of RDX — 700,000 pounds, 112,000,000 ounces — held under International Atomic Energy Agency seal, and it wandered off. Even with the exodus of engineering talent and the destruction of Iraq’s infrastructure, it will be a rare Iraqi insurgent or terrorist leader who can’t lay his hands on the people, equipment and explosives needed to manufacture a sophisticated homemade Iranian IED. (As a bonus, RDX-powered IEDs are considerably less dangerous in terms of workplace safety than the ones cobbled together from aging, free-range munitions.)

Is it possible that Iran is in fact providing bombs to insurgents? Sure: the U.S. may be generating far, far more than our fair share of national security stupidities these days, but we haven’t completely cornered the market. If they are, though, we have no proof beyond a series of non sequiturs and the assertion that Iraqis, who had the technical expertise to build a nuclear reactor and the improvisational skills necessary to keep the country’s infrastructure more or less functional during more than a decade of sanctions, are now incapable of building some relatively simple bombs. (BTC’s Eric Brewer had some words about the “evidence” of Iranian involvement in the IED industry, here and here. )

The institutional press should be questioning the administration’s assertions about Iran’s role in roadside bombings. They should be asking whether these devices use RDX or any other VHE known to be floating around Iraq in quantity (the administration acknowledged in 2004 that the stolen RDX was being used in car bombs). They should be wondering why it is the administration thinks Iraqis are now too primitive to build these relatively simple devices when, only four years ago, these same people were the cleverest, most dire threat imaginable to our national security. They should be asking why the administration calls things that aren’t proof, proof. These aren’t conceptually complex questions, and arriving at them requires little effort: the use of shaped charges in oil industry applications is not a secret, nor is the availability of the construction materials, nor is the 350 tons of missing RDX, nor is the administration’s history of lying about what other countries are or aren’t doing.

Putting those bits together oughtn’t to be a challenge, and doing so would offer some reassurance that the press won’t uniformly fold when the administration rolls out the attack on Iran promo in earnest; with enough congressional Democrats having apparently suspended disbelief on the matter of Iran to make legislative support for an attack at least possible, only the press and the native skepticism of Americans are left as obstacles.