Iraq's self-sustaining insurgency

By Michael J.W. Stickings

A troubling report from the Times:

The insurgency in Iraq is now self-sustaining financially, raising tens of millions of dollars a year from oil smuggling, kidnapping, counterfeiting, connivance by corrupt Islamic charities and other crimes that the Iraqi government and its American patrons have been largely unable to prevent, a classified United States government report has concluded...

The report offers little hope that much can be done, at least soon, to choke off insurgent revenues. For one thing, it acknowledges how little the American authorities in Iraq know — three and a half years after the invasion that toppled Saddam Hussein — about crucial aspects of insurgent operations. For another, it paints an almost despairing picture of the Iraqi government’s ability, or willingness, to take steps to tamp down the insurgency’s financing.

Read the whole article. It's important. Aside from providing us with some of the details of the insurgency's financing, it reminds us once again how little the incompetent and perhaps criminally negligent architects of this disastrous war knew about what they were doing, about what they were getting the country into.