Deadly Bombs’ Long, Winding Trail

The U.S. government’s claim yes­ter­day, that the Iranians are sup­ply­ing weapons to Iraqi mil­i­tants, was met with a huge amount of skep­ti­cism — and with good rea­son, given the Administration’s lousy intel-​​interpreting track record, and the strange con­di­tions of Sunday’s pre­sen­ta­tion. (More on that, in a sec­ond.) But, for what it’s worth, Defense Tech has been hear­ing about these weapons — espe­cially the “explosively-​​formed pro­jec­tiles,” or EFPs — for the last eigh­teen months. Many of the government’s asser­tions track, at least loosely, to what we’ve heard.
Soldiers in Iraq were already encoun­ter­ing EFPs — and the closely-​​related “shaped-​​charges” — back in the sum­mer of ’05, when I vis­ited the country.

In the gar­den, there’s a seem­ingly innocu­ous cop­per cylin­der, con­cave on one end, about the size of a gal­lon of paint. It’s called an explo­sively formed pro­jec­tile, or EFP, and when it det­o­nates, the con­cave end blows out­ward and melts into a bullet-​​shaped frag­ment that slices through armor and flesh. “Ten days ago, one of these sons-​​of-​​bitches took out an arm of a Humvee dri­ver and both his legs,” says Captain Greg Hirschey, the 717th’s com­man­der. “I get shiv­ers up my spine every time I see one.”

Back then, it was com­monly assumed that the EFP-​​makers were get­ting some over-​​the-​​border help. After all, Iranian-​​backed Hezbollah guer­ril­las have been using the weapons against Israeli tanks for some time.
A few months later, David Axe caught word of a par­tic­u­larly nasty EFP in Anbar province: infrared “tripwire-​​activated IEDs dis­guised as rocks and appar­ently employ­ing shaped-​​charge war­heads.” That sounds almost exactly like the “Fully Operational, Camouflaged Passive Infrared EFP” that the gov­ern­ment, in its Iran pre­sen­ta­tion, said was found in the Basra area, last May.
Still, does that mean there’s a direct, tight con­nec­tion between the Iranian gov­ern­ment and the Iraqi bombers? Terrorists — espe­cially ter­ror­ist bomb-​​makers — share best prac­tices, from Colombia to Spain to Lebanon to Iraq. So it’s not sur­pris­ing to see one group’s meth­ods mim­ic­ked some­where else. Take those infrared trip­wires: they were first used by the Irish Republican Army. And I don’t think we’re about to send a car­rier group to the Celtic Sea.
What’s more, when Iranian EFPs were first spot­ted in Iraq, the bombs were in the hands of Sunni insur­gents. At the time, that “seem[ed] to sug­gest a new and unusual area of coop­er­a­tion between Iranian Shiites and Iraqi Sunnis to drive American forces out — a pos­si­bil­ity that the com­man­ders said they could make lit­tle sense of, given the increas­ing vio­lence between the sects in Iraq.” But now, this looks like terror-​​makers shar­ing tricks of the trade, rather some grand, ecu­meni­cal alliance.
Or, as Kevin Drum notes, Iran could just be try­ing to stoke chaos on all sides. “If I were in charge of Iran, it’s prob­a­bly what I’d be doing,” he writes. And there’s more than just the EFPs to tie Tehran to the con­flict in Iraq. Iranian TNT and newly-​​minted mor­tars were also trot­ted out in the American pre­sen­ta­tion. “The evi­dence of Iranian med­dling in Iraq,” McClatchy notes, “is far more com­pelling than much of the administration’s pre-​​war intel­li­gence about Iraq.“
That said, if the case was iron­clad, the admin­is­tra­tion wouldn’t be resort­ing to silly maneu­vers like these when it made its case for Iran’s involvement:

The offi­cials said they would speak only on the con­di­tion of anonymity, so the explo­sives expert and the ana­lyst, who would nor­mally not speak to the news media, could pro­vide infor­ma­tion directly. The analyst’s exact title and full name were not revealed to reporters. The offi­cials released a PowerPoint pre­sen­ta­tion includ­ing pho­tographs of the weaponry, but did not allow media rep­re­sen­ta­tives to record, pho­to­graph or video­tape the brief­ing or the mate­ri­als on display.

Too much is rid­ing on this evi­dence for such chi­canery. Make the case cleanly, guys. Or don’t make it at all.
UPDATE 5:11 PM: As ben­joya notes in the com­ments to a pre­vi­ous post, Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Peter Pace doesn’t agree with the administration’s assess­ment.
UPDATE 5:36 PM: Be sure to read Newsweek’s cover story, too. But be ready to wince.

February 12th, 2007 | Bomb Squad, Strategery | Comments Off Both comments and pings are currently closed.