No Bull
The Iraqi government fired the security chief of Baghdad after a day of multiple bombings left more than 150 dead
BBC News - Baghdad security chief fired after bombings. That was probably an overdue firing. Leaving aside the grim prospect of a wave of destabilizing violence sweeping across Iraq, sweeping aside the fragile order and normalicy which was to be the legacy of our six year involvement
Election Date Set in Iraq as Bombs Kill Scores - NYTimes.com. These bombings may be the inevitable result of one aspect of Iraqi forces replacing American policing. A pervasive unscientific sentiment in operations.
One particular bizarre part of this of this is the widespread reliance by Iraqi security forces on a certain bomb detection device. The use of this device was covered in a number of articles about a month ago Iraq Swears by Bomb Detector U.S. Sees as Useless - NYTimes.com. They are small handheld boxes, that purport to be electronic, about the size of a hand gun made of black plastic. With a telescoping metal wand sticking out of one end very much like a transistor radio antenna. They don't take batteries (they are "charged" by their operator walking slowly in a straight line with them) to have batteries might invite too much speculation about what the electricity might be doing inside them, along what circuitous paths. The claims made for them are astounding. They can find bombs - any type of munitions in fact - in things, under things, and from a hundred paces. They can only perform these feats; however, in the hands of a properly experienced controller. What they really are is clear enough: they are witching wands, divining rods, forked sticks updated.
They are also 16,500 to 60,000 dollars a piece. The Iraqi security forces have bought hundreds of them. It's hard to see that that wouldn't involve U S money at some level. When I first read about these devices I considered the possibility that the people in charge of buying and deploying these devices know they are well within the category of magical thinking, but that they wanted to deploy an earnest fiction. Faced with an impossible security task, trying to maintain traffic checkpoints in many dozens of locations throughout a city of five or six million people, they went with a plan that gave the appearance of control and efficiency, and allowed traffic to move. A managed irrationality. To the extent they were fooling themselves a pseudo-rationality. I reflected at the time this was a gambit which would to work well for a time, then fail horrifically if not catastrophically. The person who was fired was the Baghdad security chief Lt Gen. Abboud Qanbar. The article on his firing made no reference to these devices. A man who ought to be fired as well, is the general from the NY Times article: Maj. Gen. Jehad al-Jabiri a higher ranking officer identified as the head of the Ministry of the Interior[base ']s General Directorate for Combating Explosives. He came across sounding more pompous and condescending than a man in his position needs to be. His pull quote from the article: "I know more about this issue than the Americans do. In fact, I know more about bombs than anyone in the world" offers a taste. Even if a placebo effect was what was sought, why would you pay such exorbitant sums for an empty plastic box? The possible idea that they would have to cost enough to justify a belief in what they could do doesn't cut it. Everybody knows there is nothing a good twig of hickory doesn't know. It would work just as well and a thousand colonial New England wells stand dug in testimony. A towering malfeasance of some kind lies at the bottom of this. Another man who should be dealt with; the man whose address in London ought to be handed out to every relative of every man women and child killed in these latest bomb blasts is Jim McCormick a head of the soulless British (based) company ATSC (UK) Ltd. that sells these swindle sticks.
The U S military people the NY Times spoke to were uniform in denouncing the abominable absurdity of this device. I'm sure at some point they got a hold of one and took it apart. So the question is why is this company still in business? Perhaps questioning the defense/security industry is simply outside the parameters of the game. The IED is still the unmet threat of these small wars
Gates to lead 6-month push against roadside bombs - Yahoo! News. The roadside bomb, market-bomb and car or truck bomb still defeats our attempts to ameliorate its effect. Its low tech nature belaying the effectiveness that high tech and omnipresent consumer electronics used as triggering mechanism give industrial chemicals and mass manufactured military explosives. The disruptive nature of these weapons places pressure on the political advancements in Iraq, and in Afghanistan they work toward making the Long War ever longer. With the eye on making it too long.
The whole story of the ADE 651 device, which is not the way forward here, is emblematic of the incongruous mix of cultures and strained alignment of Iraqi sensibilities to western technological bureaucracy.
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