This story from the Times didn't get any play on Sunday, so I thought I'd take a look at it today. The short version:

Question: How can you "stand up" the Iraqi army when they're selling all their new guns in the black market?

Answer: You can't. We are so fucked.

But, as always with Junior's Excellent Adventure in Iraq, the details are always interesting, and appeal the same way that one can't take one's eyes off a horrific traffic accident. Here's how the magic of the marketplace is working in Iraq:

Weapon prices are soaring along with an expanding sectarian war, as more buyers push prices several times higher than those that existed at the time of the American-led invasion nearly four years ago. Rising prices, in turn, have encouraged an insidious form of Iraqi corruption — the migration of army and police weapons from Iraqi state armories to black-market sales.

Three types of American-issued weapons are now readily visible in shops and bazaars here as well: Glock and Walther 9-millimeter pistols, and pristine, unused Kalashnikovs from post-Soviet Eastern European countries.

“Every type of gun that the Americans give comes to the market,” said Brig. Hassan Nouri, chief of the political investigations bureau for the Sulaimaniya district. “They go from the U.S. Army to the Iraqi Army to the smugglers. I have captured many of these guns that the terrorists bought.”

Well, freedom's untidy. Want a gun? See your friendly neighborhood dealer!

The dealer said they had recently been taken from an Iraqi armory. “Almost all of the weapons come from the Iraqi police and army,” he said. “They are our best suppliers.”

And what's at the heart of the matter? You got it, yet more Enron-style accounting Republican accounting procedures!

[The program] was criticized by a special inspector general this fall for, among other things, failing to properly account for the arms.

How bad was the accounting?

Tracing American-issued weapons back to Iraqi units that sell them is especially difficult because the United States did not register serial numbers for almost all of the 370,000 small arms purchased for Iraqi security forces, according to a report by the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction.

So, we didn't keep track of the weapons. Are the Iraqis?

Throughout Mr. Hussein’s rule, Iraqi Army officers were in the arms trade, he said, selling weapons to smugglers. This was how the Kurdish guerrillas kept themselves supplied.

Now, he said, the smugglers remain in business, and their trade is made easier because the [Iraqi] units often do not have inventories. “I am surprised sometimes by the numbers,” he said. “Sometimes they come by the hundreds.”

Let's review: Bush imports hundreds of thousands of weapons, with no serial numbers, and without any inventory controls, into the Fucking middle of civil war.

What did he expect but exactly what happened?

That this grotesquerie was the result of incompetence... I just can't get my head around that.

I hate to put on the foil, really, but at some point it just makes more sense to assume that what happened is what was supposed to happen.

The chaos that results from flooding a civil war market with weapons is the plan, just as putting neo-con Michael Ledeen's twenty-something daughter in charge of billions of unaccounted for Iraqi reconstruction money is the plan.

Chaos is the plan. Bush and his friends? It's working out very well for them.