Could it be? Maybe?
Or is it just hot fart mist to cover their own asses?
Believe it when I see it, I guess.
"Iraq Plans to Confront Security Firms on Guns" by JAMES GLANZ
BAGHDAD, Nov. 7 — The Iraqi interior minister said Wednesday that he would authorize raids by his security forces on Western security firms to ensure that they were complying with tightened licensing requirements on guns and other weaponry, setting up the possibility of violent confrontations between the Iraqis and heavily armed Western guards.
That isn't going to help the security of the surge, is it?
Jawad al-Bolani, the minister, said of the planned raids: “Every company will be subject to such examination, and any company that does not follow the law will lose its license. They are called security companies. They are not called violate-the-law companies.”
During a tour of the Interior Ministry compound in eastern Baghdad, Iraqi government officials also said for the first time that they accepted estimates by American oversight officials that some 190,000 pistols and automatic rifles supplied by the United States to Iraqi forces in 2004 and 2005 were unaccounted for.
Many of those weapons were distributed when Gen. David H. Petraeus, now the American commander in Iraq, was in charge of training and equipping Iraqi security forces in 2004 and 2005. General Petraeus has said that he decided to arm the Iraqi forces as quickly as possible, before tracking systems were fully in place.
Old GUN-RUNNER Puke-tray-us, huh?
Within Baghdad’s relatively safe and heavily guarded Green Zone, there have been early indications of a battle over who controls Iraqi streets. Private security guards say that Iraqi police officers have already descended on Western compounds and stopped vehicles driven by Westerners to check for weapons violations in recent weeks.
Any extension of those measures into the rest of the country, known as the Red Zone, could quickly turn into armed confrontation. Westerners are wary of Interior Ministry checkpoints, some of which have been fake, as well as of ministry units, which are sometimes militia-controlled and have been implicated in sectarian killings. Western convoys routinely have to choose between the risk of stopping and the risk of accelerating past what appear to be official Iraqi forces.
Or blowing them away, don't forget that option, NYT!
And because Western convoys run by private security companies are often protecting senior American civilian and military officials, the Iraqi government’s struggle with the companies has in some cases become a sort of proxy tug-of-war with the United States.
The beginning of the end for US occupation -- whether Amurka likes it or not?
